Chapter 1 — I Do, Then Gunfire
1038 Words
The priest's mouth was still moving when the first bullet shattered the stained glass above the altar.
Valentina Conti heard the crack of it — sharp and impossible, like God himself had cleared his throat — before she understood what was happening. The sound bounced off centuries-old stone walls and came back wrong, too loud, too real for a Tuesday morning in Milan.
Then someone screamed.
Then everyone screamed.
"Down." The man beside her — her husband of approximately forty-seven seconds — said it with the calm of someone commenting on the weather. His hand closed around her wrist before she could think, and the world tilted sideways as Luca pulled her off her feet and behind the nearest marble pillar.
She hit her knees on the stone floor. The impact cracked through her bones and she hissed a curse that definitely did not belong in a church.
Another shot. Then three in rapid succession. The enormous flower arrangements exploded in a shower of white petals. Roses rained down like snow over the pews, and the guests — Milan's most dangerous and powerful, apparently — scattered with a practiced efficiency that told Valentina this was not the first time any of them had run from bullets.
Her dress was a Valentino. Seventy thousand euros of hand-beaded silk, and it was currently bunched around her knees on a dirty church floor.
"My dress," she said.
The man — Luca Ferraro, her husband, a stranger, a devil — looked at her with eyes the color of deep water and said absolutely nothing.
He had a gun in his hand. She hadn't seen him draw it. He'd simply produced it the way other men produced their phones, casual and practiced, and now he was scanning the chaos above the pews with the expression of someone solving a mildly interesting puzzle.
Another burst of gunfire. A chandelier exploded. Crystal rained across the altar where the priest had been standing — where she had been standing — and Valentina pressed herself flat against the marble pillar and tried to remember how to breathe.
She was going to die in her wedding dress. She hadn't even wanted to be married in it.
Seventy-two hours ago she had been in her apartment in the Brera district of Milan, eating tiramisu in bed and arguing with her sister on the phone about whether Giuseppe from accounting was worth another date. Her life had been hers. Stupid and spoiled and wonderfully, completely hers.
Then her father had sat her down in his study.
And everything had stopped.
"We need to move." Luca's voice was low and controlled, nothing like the situation required.
"Move where?" she hissed. "There are people shooting at us."
"At me," he corrected. "They're shooting at me. You're incidental."
"Oh, that's so much better, thank you."
He pressed something cold and flat into her hand. She looked down. A phone.
"Call the number already open. Tell them we're in the east corridor. Say exactly that."
"I'm not your secretary—"
"Valentina." He said her name for the first time. Low and precise as a blade. "Call the number."
She called the number. The person who answered didn't say hello. They just said, "Position?"
"East corridor," she said, feeling genuinely insane. "We're in the east corridor." The line went dead.
Luca rose from his crouch smoothly, returned fire twice, and dropped back down beside her. She felt the sound of the shots in her sternum. She hadn't known guns were that loud without a television to muffle them.
Her arm was bleeding. She noticed it distantly — a graze along her forearm where a shard of crystal had caught her in the first burst of chaos. The blood was dark red against her white sleeve, blooming slowly like a rose opening in reverse.
"You're hit," Luca said. He had noticed before she had.
"It's fine." It wasn't, quite, but she refused to be the woman who cried about a graze at her own wedding m******e.
His jaw tightened. He looked at the wound, then at her face, then at the wound again. Something moved behind his eyes. She didn't have the vocabulary for it yet.
"There's a passage," he said. "Behind the altar, beneath the sacristy. Fifteenth century. The Church of San Lorenzo has eleven of them." He said this the way someone would reference publicly available information. Which meant he had planned for this.
"Can you run?" he asked.
Valentina looked down at her heels. Looked up at his face. She reached down, unstrapped both shoes in three seconds, and held them up beside her head.
"I can now," she said.
He took her hand — not tenderly, not romantically, as a pure tactical necessity — and they ran.
The passage was exactly where he said. Hidden behind a carved wooden panel in the sacristy that swung outward on a hinge so old it groaned like a living thing. It smelled of stone and time and the deep, settled cold of things buried underground.
She ran barefoot through a fifteenth-century tunnel beneath Milan with blood on her sleeve and her wedding dress trailing like a ghost behind her, and somewhere above them the gunfire was fading.
They emerged from the passage into blinding afternoon light, into the rear courtyard of a building she didn't recognize, into the waiting open door of an armored black car. Luca pushed her inside first. Followed. The door closed. They moved.
Valentina sat in the back of the car, bleeding gently, barefoot, still holding her shoes, and looked at the man who had just saved her life.
He was already on his phone, speaking in low rapid Italian to someone she couldn't hear, his suit jacket still perfectly pressed, not a single hair out of place. He looked like a man who had stepped away from a boring meeting, not a gunfight.
He caught her looking. Met her gaze without apology.
Neither of them looked away.
Outside, Milan moved past the tinted windows in the afternoon light, indifferent and golden, knowing nothing at all.
Forty-seven seconds, she thought. That was how long I was his wife before everything exploded.
She had a feeling the exploding was only beginning.
- Writer
