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"Tomato, potato, the family money must be long. Their property in the vineyard is highly sought after. Perhaps you can convince your husband to add you to the deed."
I cut her off. "Really, Ma? You're here twenty seconds and already trying to figure out a way to weasel some money out of these people."
Before she can reply, there's an odd shift to the air around us. A stillness right before the sounds of something zipping past us. The first pop isn't a familiar sound, but the commotion that comes after it can't be ignored. Several shots follow the first. Chips of the extravagant fountain fly. The men split up with Alessandro and Jenkins running toward us.
My father scoops up Courtney and Roman as Alessandro dives in front of me, yanking me by the waist to pull me onto the ground.
"Get down, Evelyn!" Alessandro shouts, covering my head with his arm and sheltering me against the car. Chunks and chips of marble spray with every bullet ricocheting across the property.
Lorenzo moves with stealth to the trunk of the car, pulls out a few guns, and passes them to a band of men who take off in a bunch of directions.
"What the hell is going on? Who's shooting at us?" I ask him in a panic. My pulse races and my eyes dart around. "Where's my mother? My niece and nephew?"
Lorenzo hands Alessandro a handgun, and he checks the clip before taking off his jacket. Alessandro looks over his shoulder just in time to see my father speeding out of the parking lot, but Jenkins is coming over to us.
"You're rehired," Alessandro snarls at him. "Get Evelyn out of here."
"Come on, Evelyn." Jenkins holds his hand out, but fear keeps me in place.
Alessandro grabs me by the shoulders to shake me out of my trance. "Evelyn, get out of here. Now! Go somewhere safe."
I snap out of it in time for someone to yell in the distance. "We got the fucker! We got him alive! We're bringing him to the pool house."
Alessandro growls, anger radiating from every pore of his body. "My razor, Ren."
Lorenzo pulls out a straight razor and hands it to Alessandro, who turns angrily to me and Jenkins.
"What the fuck are you still doing here? Get her out of here. Make sure you're not followed." The darkness in his voice scares me as Jenkins moves me into the car I came in. Lorenzo tosses him the keys as he and Alessandro stalk off somewhere to the side of the house.
"Uh, Jenkins, you can take me to Anita's. You remember the address, right?"
"Yes. No problem, but I'm not sure we should bring whatever happened to her doorstep."
"I just want to feel safe. I can't go to Shana's. That's the only place I want to go. I need some space to think and calm down. Just get me there, Jenkins," I practically shout at him.
He keeps his mouth shut and does as I tell him, driving me around in circles with his eyes darting back and forth to the rearview mirror. It makes me turn over my shoulder a time or two to see whether anyone's following us.
Eventually, the adrenaline subsides. Jenkins pulls onto a wide street in front of an apartment complex in a so-so area of Brooklyn. It used to be a great neighborhood when we were kids. A place where everyone knew everyone. Then it went to shit, falling to the wayside when a local gang took over. Now?
It's leaning toward gentrification with some Eastern Europeans taking over. After sending Anita a quick text, she meets me downstairs in her building's lobby where she hugs me tightly. We head upstairs where Jenkins waits outside the door. Although Anita's parents left her the apartment for sunnier pastures in Arizona, she keeps the two-bedroom pretty much the same as when we grew up.
"What the hell is going on, girl?" Anita asks. Skin as radiant as dark honey, full lips, and green eyes similar to mine stare at me with sympathy and worry. "I'm just getting ready for dinner. You can tell Jenkins to come in. It makes my neighbors nervous when he's out there like that."
"I just needed a minute to gather my thoughts and I didn't want to check into a hotel. There was a shooting at this house on the island. We were supposed to be having a Family dinner when all hell broke loose. Alessandro told Jenkins to get me out of there. There's rumors about the Montegnas going after our territories. I wouldn't put it past them to try something like this. The problem is we were there. So were Ma, Roman, and Courtney."
"Women and kids used to be off limits," she says. "You want something to eat? I'm about to order something for lunch."
"What am I thinking? I shouldn't be here. What if the Montegnas have somebody on me or something? I don't know what's going on. Everything's been up in the air since Peter took off. Now I'm married to Alessandro, and the day I insisted on doing Sunday dinner, it gets shot up before we can even break bread."
"Calm down," she says, holding my hands. "No one's coming into these buildings looking for the Rossi princess. No, wait, it's the De Luca queen now, isn't it? Tell me about Alessandro."
"He's a force in every room he steps into. There's a ruthless honesty about him, and I'd hate to be anyone on his bad side. Sometimes, the way he looks at me, the way we are, we just have a natural rhythm about us that I can't shake. It's like we've lived this life before, but there's still so much we don't know about one another."
"Take your time, then. What's your next move?" she asks.
I shrug. "I'll probably head home and wait for Alessandro to get there. He's got one hell of a setup that makes me feel like it's going to be the safest place for me. I shouldn't have come here."
"Girl, for the last time, it's fine. I get it. You can lose anybody on the BQE, and at the very worst, you can lose anybody within five square blocks of these apartment buildings."
