The Rival Heiress

Chapter 4 — Under the Table

Sound came apart before anything else did.

Elena would remember it that way later — not the glass, not the screaming, but the sound splitting into pieces first, like her brain refused to process it as one event: a crack, a roar, a hundred small impacts landing at once, and somewhere underneath all of it, Vincent Rossi's wine glass shattering against the tablecloth in a spray of red that for one terrible half-second looked like blood.

Then Damian's hand closed around her wrist and yanked her sideways so hard her chair went over with her still half in it, and the world became the underside of a dinner table, dark and close and smelling like spilled wine and gunpowder.

"Stay down," he said, right against her ear, and then his whole body was over hers — not gentle, not careful, a wall of muscle and expensive fabric pressing her flat against the floor while glass rained down around them and the world outside the table upended into chaos.

She could hear her father shouting orders. She could hear boots, a lot of them, moving fast in every direction. She could hear at least one voice that wasn't shouting words anymore, just sound, high and wrong, and she made herself not think about whose it was.

"Are you hit?" Damian's voice, still low, still right against her ear, his weight braced over her like he intended to stay there until someone told him it was safe, or until someone killed him trying.

"No. You?"

"No."

Neither of them moved.

The gunfire didn't come from inside the restaurant — that was the first thing Elena's mind managed to process clearly, once the ringing in her ears settled enough to let her think at all. It was coming from the street, sustained bursts aimed at the window, not the short controlled fire of professionals clearing a room. Whoever was out there wasn't trying to walk in and finish the job. They were trying to make a point from a distance and disappear before anyone could return fire.

It worked. By the time Marchetti and Rossi soldiers alike had their weapons up and were moving toward the shattered window, the street outside was already empty — no vehicle, no muzzle flashes, nothing but broken glass glittering under the restaurant's exterior lights and a scorched black mark along the brick where the first rounds had struck low and wide.

Damian pulled back just enough to look down at her, and for one unguarded second, before either of them remembered who they were supposed to hate, there was nothing on his face but the plain, human fact of being glad she was breathing.

Then he seemed to catch himself doing it, and the wall came back up almost as fast as it had dropped.

"Can you stand?"

"Yes." She could. Her legs didn't fully agree, but she stood anyway, because standing was the only thing that felt like control in a room that had just come apart.

The private dining room looked like a battlefield dressed for a wedding — overturned chairs, shattered stemware, the toast that had never finished pooling across white linen in a stain that would never fully wash out. Vincent Rossi was on his feet, unhurt, barking instructions to his men. Salvatore had his gun drawn and his body angled instinctively in front of where Elena had been sitting, a father's reflex arriving a half-second too late to matter, and something in his face when he saw her upright and breathing made her chest ache in a way she didn't have time to examine.

"Nobody's hit," someone called from the door. "Two of the window staff, minor cuts. That's it."

It should have felt like relief. It mostly felt like disbelief — that a restaurant full of people could take that kind of fire and walk away with nothing worse than lacerations, which meant either God was watching very closely tonight, or whoever fired those shots had never intended to actually kill anyone inside.

Elena's mind snagged on that thought and wouldn't let go of it.

A warning. Not an attack. The note in her purse from earlier in the evening — the wedding won't happen — rose up in her memory with a cold, sick clarity she hadn't let herself feel until just now.

Someone was making very sure both families understood exactly how easy this had been.

She knelt, before she'd fully decided to, at the base of the shattered window, where the responding officers hadn't yet cordoned off the scene. Small brass shells littered the sidewalk visible through the broken glass, catching the light. She'd grown up around enough of her father's business to know what Marchetti hardware looked like when it was spent. She knew what Rossi hardware looked like too, from thirty years of funerals on both sides.

This wasn't either one.

She picked up a single casing before anyone could stop her, turning it over in her fingers under the restaurant's dim light, and went very still.

Stamped into the base, faint but unmistakable, was a mark she had never seen in her entire life — not on a single weapon that had ever passed through either family's hands.

"Elena." Damian's voice, close behind her, tight with something that wasn't quite alarm yet but was getting there fast. "What is that."

She looked up at him, the casing still warm in her palm, and for the first time since she'd walked into her father's office four days ago, she understood that the war she'd been raised inside might not be the war she was actually about to fight.

"I don't know," she said. "But it isn't yours. And it isn't mine."