The Don’s Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty Chapter 11

The Don’s Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty Chapter 11

I saw them in the side mirror first. Three black SUVs, holding distance, changing lanes when we changed

lanes

“Misha.” My voice came out impossibly calm. “Behind us.”

My grandfather’s driver glanced up, and his face told me everything. “Hold the children,” he said, and the

armored town car surged forward.

What happened in the next four minutes, I have reconstructed from fragments: Misha’s voice barking Russian into his collar. The twins’ car seats, which I covered with my own body. The screech of an intersection. And the moment our escape route – a narrow street in Brooklyn Heights – turned out to be blocked by a fourth SUV, because Marco Russo had planned this the way Dante said he would: not by breaching a fortress, but by

waiting for one ordinary morning.

Men got out of the vehicles. Six of them. Armed.

And then a black Maserati screamed into the mouth of the street behind them, fishtailed sideways into a

barricade of Italian steel, and Dante Moretti got out shooting.

I learned later that he’d put his own men on us in secret – a second shadow detail trailing my grandfather’s, every day, because I know how it’s done, Aria. I’ve ordered how it’s done. When the Russo crew went mobile that morning, his men called him first.

He hadn’t called for backup. There hadn’t been time.

The street became thunder. Misha returned fire over the hood; Volkov reinforcements were ninety seconds out, which is a generation in a gunfight. I lay across my daughters’ car seats, a hand on each tiny chest, whispering into the screaming – I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you – while their father stood in the open street between the guns and our car and refused to move

Six against one. He dropped two. The Volkov convoy roared in and the Russo crew broke and scattered, and

for one suspended second, it was over and everyone was alive

Then I saw Dante sway

He turned toward the car – toward us – checking, always checking, and that was when I saw the red blooming across his white shirt, just under the ribs. Almost exactly where I’d stitched him three years ago, in

another life, in a silent kitchen.

He went down on one knee in the middle of the street.

I don’t remember opening the door. I remember concrete under my knees and my hands pressing his wound

– nurse’s hands, steady even while the rest of me screamed – and his face, gray and strangely calm, looking

up at me.

“The girls,” he rasped.

“They’re safe. They’re safe, Dante, stay with me -”

“Take them and run.” His hand found my wrist, slick with his own blood. “If Russo’s still moving your grandfather promise me -”

“Shut up. Shut up.” I pressed harder. Around us, Volkov men formed a wall of bodies and gun barrels; someone was shouting for the trauma kit; sirens were a distant rumor. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to finally show up and then die, do you hear me? They know your heartbeat now. Stella stops crying for you You don’t get to take that away from them.”

His eyes were going unfocused, but his mouth curved – the ghost of that grin I’d only just met.

“You said… they,” he murmured. “Not… them and you.”

“Dante -”

“It’s okay.” His hand tightened on my wrist with the last of his strength. “Three years, I made you invisible. Let me be… the one thing that stood between them and the dark. Just once. It’s a fair… trade.”

“It is not a fair trade

His eyes rolled back.

His hand went slack in mine.

And as the Volkov medics tore him away from me onto a stretcher, as my daughters wailed from the car, as my hands dripped with their father’s blood on a Brooklyn street – I discovered, in the worst possible way, the thing I had spent six months refusing to know.

Somewhere between the rain and the pasta and a baby sighing against his chest, I had stopped wanting

Dante Moretti to suffer.

I had started needing him to live.