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“Mai,” I said in her native tongue and then, “Never.”

“Even if you had to choose between me and your brother?” she challenged, rising on the tips of her high heels so she could get even closer, breathe the very same air. “Even if it was between me and the world as you knew it?”

“I don’t want to know a world without you in it,” I confessed honestly. “I’d kill every person living if it meant keeping you alive.”

“Why?” she asked, and for the second time I felt gut punched by the question.

Why did I do anything?

Because I was ordered.

But if anything, I had been instructed not to feel anything for anyone, let alone this all-consuming passion for a woman who was not meant to be mine.

So why?

Why her?

“Because you taught me how to want,” I said simply, and then I spotted the red mark of a sniper rifle’s sight darting down the side of her arm as it traveled over, presumably, to my back. “Get down, now.”

“What?”

But I was already pushing her head down by the hair, kicking out her legs with a swipe of my foot so she collapsed to the stone walkway.

Barely a second later, a loud crack of gunfire exploded across the park, amplified by the water so it echoed like a bomb. Somewhere in the trees, a woman screamed in response.

She couldn’t have known the bullet was meant for me.

I used the momentum of shoving Fiammetta to the ground to spin away, a split second too late to avoid the shot entirely.

The impact slammed into my upper arm, the outside meat of my deltoid. I stumbled back at the force and then grunted as numb pressure gave way to a fiery wash of pain. It only proved to heighten my senses, strip whatever veneer of civility I presented away to the studs.

When I dropped down beneath the protective wall of the bridge, I was no longer man, but beast.

“Ben, do you have their location?” I asked into the earpiece I’d secured in the restroom before leaving the restaurant.

“Southwest of you. Eighteen yards, one of the bastards took the shot and took off on foot. The other put a silenced bullet in Paulie’s fuckin’ knee, but Paulie managed to take him down. He’s dead.”

“Luca,” Fia called, pressed to the opposite wall, her face almost ghostly pale in the dim lights of the park. “You’re bleeding.”

“Luigi,” I said into the channel, knowing that he and Stefan were lying in wait somewhere in the park. “Can you get to us?”

“Thirty seconds, boss,” he replied, and by the sound of his breathing, I knew he was running.

Half a minute later, he was jogging up the bridge in a half crouch, gun between his hands.

“Get Fia to the car,” I ordered, noting Stefan following up behind him. “Anything happens to her, I castrate you and feed you your balls as your last meal, understood?”

Luigi nodded tersely, already moving to cover my wife.

“Luca,” she tried again, struggling against Luigi’s hold to get to me. “You’ve been shot.”

“Get the fuck home. I hear you gave them trouble, there will be consequences,” I bit out before I checked my gun, flicking off the safety. Into the mic, I demanded, “Where are you and the shooter?”

“Circling the North Pond on the east side,” Ben huffed through the speaker.

I took off and didn’t look back, not even when Fiammetta called my name.

Running felt good. It shook off some of the pain seeping into my bones and reminded me I had been born and raised to do this.