Finally, the priest switched gears. “If the couple will now join hands.” I passed my bouquet to Chiara and clasped onto my groom’s slightly calloused palms. “Let us pray…”
As everyone else bowed their heads, though, Romeo tugged me closer. “Are you all right, farfalla?” he murmured for my ears only.
“Did you arrange for Giorgio to be here today?” I asked instead.
I felt him grin against my neck. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“I have a surprise for you, too,” I whispered, then took a deep breath and pressed his hand to my abdomen. “I’m going to have your baby.” I leaned back by a couple of degrees to gauge his expression.
But before he could say anything or even react, I caught a flash of movement out of my peripheral vision. I had just tilted my head to glance behind my groom when there was a popping noise. Romeo jerked, and I brought my attention back to his face, which gaped at me in shock before creasing with pain.
The priest broke off, and screams echoed throughout the chamber. Romeo blinked and abruptly lost his balance, taking me down with him. I landed on his side and heard him hiss, my mind scrambling to keep up with what had just happened. I lifted myself off of him, sitting back, and found that my palms were covered in blood. Gasping, I whisked my head back down and saw a pool of crimson appearing from beneath my groom. I ripped at his suit jacket to get to the pristine white shirt underneath, spotting the stain spreading across it from just above his hip bone.
“Oh, no. Oh, God…”
All my concentration had been on Romeo, so when an iron grip wrenched me into the air away from him, I cried out. Then, I heard a voice I’d never thought I’d hear again. A second shot erruptted from his gun, this time up into the renowned Tree of Life mosaic gleaming above us, eliciting more shrieks of horror.
“Ah, the prodigal son returned from the dead,” Gianni Cavetti drawled out, clucking his tongue. He dragged me behind him then kicked my groom in the same side as his gunshot wound, making Romeo roar in agony.
“No,” I gasped out, fighting him, but Gianni only snatched me by my shoulders and pressed me up against him, his free arm around my chest like a vice. He continued on from his pulpit, pointing and laughing at Romeo as my groom grunted and bled on the floor.
“Doesn’t seem so suited for leadership now, does he? The heir of Angelo Cavetti. Just because he was the firstborn didn’t mean he deserved the throne. I was always better. Wiser. More even-handed. Yet he was to be awarded everything. Everything. As his birthright. While I was to be given nothing but the leftovers. The scraps. And that was only if I were lucky.”
Gianni swung his weapon out toward the wedding guests, making many duck behind the long wooden pews for cover. Weapons were not allowed at communal mafia celebrations like weddings, so the attendees, while all at least loosely affiliated with the various crime families, had been required to come unarmed. Marcello and Savio, who’d been standing behind Romeo during the ceremony, now knelt at his side.
“But I’m not leaving with nothing anymore,” Gianni ranted on, sounding delirious. “You all came here to watch a Cavetti marry a Bonifacio, for some honest to goodness nuptials, and nuptials are what you’ll get.” He pointed his nine-millimeter at the priest. “Marry us.”
“But… my son…”
Gianni fired a bullet into the altar within inches of the priest’s feet. “Marry us!” he bellowed, his voice ringing off the acoustics of the expansive space.
Hysteria filled my brain as I took in the scene. The man who was supposed to become my husband bleeding out a few paces away. His brothers behind him looking grim. The twins holding onto one another for dear life. The audience cowering in dismay, though I did see that Natalia had disappeared from her place, and my brother Giorgio had pinned the gun-toting Gianni with a death glare. Angelo Cavetti, the almighty patriarch, was conspicuous only by his absence.
I continued to do my best to wriggle free.
The priest read off a shortened version of the wedding ceremony, going straight to the vows. When it came to be my turn to speak, I buttoned my lip, hoping that would in some way dissuade this psycho, but it didn’t. He merely waved the priest on.
“Keep trying to get loose and you die,” Gianni hissed at me, sounding like the viper he was. “I can just replace you with one of your handy dandy sisters, can’t I? Is that what you want?” He nestled the cold steel barrel of his weapon right between my eyes, and I went still. I didn’t have a choice. Gianni turned toward the priest again. “Pronounce us.”
Without more than a moment’s hesitation, the priest finished his officiation. “By the power vested in me by the state of Illinois, I pronounce you man and wife.”
“I may kiss the bride,” Gianni shouted, laughing maniacally, and though I turned my face, he held the back of my skull and smashed his mouth to mine anyway, forcing it open. I tasted alcohol and something that reminded me of industrial chemicals, and as he broke the kiss, I pivoted slightly, vomiting all over his shiny black shoes right there in front of everyone.
Gianni backhanded me, and though I managed to retain my footing, I definitely saw stars. I also heard Romeo pant out a savage, “I’ll fucking butcher you,” toward his second brother. If he hadn’t be so incapacitated, I knew he would’ve already made certain that Gianni went back to being dead. But for now, the man I’d once thought of as the peacemaking Cavetti remained all too alive.
Strong-arming me, Gianni pushed me down the aisle and out to a waiting limousine, our limousine—the one for Romeo and I—the motor already running and a driver behind the wheel. “Let’s go.”
The driver hit the gas, and I stared behind me at St. Clements through the tint of the back glass, watching it shrink smaller and smaller and feeling nothing but dread. Of all the things I’d thought might happen today, I’d never imagined anything like this.
Not once in even my wildest dreams had I ever envisioned myself married to a ghost.
18
Romeo
Impotent fury and excruciating pain coursed through my body as I stood by watching my dead brother come back to life to kidnap Lucia. Not that I was actually standing. Instead, I laid there helpless as an infant, unable to save the woman I loved.
The woman I loved.
It figured that it’d take something this monumental to illustrate to me how I felt. I’d put this off. Avoided it and ignored it when it’d been there all along. I’d loved my farfalla from the beginning, and the more time I’d spent with her, the more lightness and goodness she’d wrung from me, drop by drop.
And she carried my child. Our child. I didn’t give a single fuck about legacies or bloodlines or surnames. All that mattered to me was that I got Lucia and my baby back whatever the price. I tried a number of times to get up, but whatever Gianni had done when he kicked me wouldn’t even allow me to breathe. Still, I had to get to Lucia. I had to.
Pandemonium had broken out the minute Gianni had disappeared with her, and obsidian blackness kept encroaching along the edges of my vision. I kept telling Marcello and Savio to help me up, but I didn’t think my lips had moved. With the noise at such high levels rebounding off of every surface, I doubted they would’ve heard me even if I had spoken aloud.