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Adriana looked away first.

I reached for the whisky I had barely touched.

Marcello looked at me from the sofa where he sat. “Careful, brother.”

I turned toward him. His attention remained on his cigar, but amusement pulled at one corner of his mouth.

“With what?”

“The way you’re looking at her.”

The room grew quieter. Raze leaned back in his chair and exhaled through his nose, though I saw the beginning of a smile.

I looked back toward the kitchen.

Adriana was concentrating on the chocolate again, but color had risen beneath the flour on her cheek. She had heard him.

Her fingers tightened around the bowl. So did mine around the whisky glass.

For ten years, I had lived without wanting. Now Adriana stood in the centre of the home I had abandoned, surrounded by the family I had convinced myself I no longer deserved, and made me want both with a violence that frightened me.

Adriana snuck a look toward the sitting room again. Her eyes found mine through the open doorway, and the conversation around me faded beneath the quiet pull of her attention. Her gaze dropped to the cigar between my fingers. One eyebrow lifted. I had taken two reluctant draws from it, and she looked at me as though I had personally disappointed her.

The corner of my mouth began to rise.

Just as the window behind Raze’s chair exploded.

Glass tore through the room before the crack of the rifle reached us.

Raze dropped to the ground. Archie kicked his chair aside and drew his pistol before he struck the floor. Marcello rolled from the sofa and landed behind its heavy arm, the cigar still caught between two fingers. My weapon was already in my hand.

A second bullet punched through the wall where Raze’s head had been less than a heartbeat earlier. Plaster burst over the chair and coated his shoulders.

“Lights,” he ordered.

Marcello reached above the sofa and hit the switch.

Darkness swallowed the room.

The easy warmth of moments earlier vanished beneath plaster dust and the bitter smell of gun powder.

Archie pressed his phone to his ear as he moved toward the hall.

“Atlas. Raze’s house. We’re under armed assault.”

He ended the call without waiting for an answer.

Three seconds later, the estate alarm began to howl. It was not the steady warning used when a vehicle approached the gates. The violent pulse meant the perimeter had already been breached.

Upstairs, the children would be waking. The thought entered my chest like a knife was being driven through it.

Raze reached the security panel about a side table. Half the indicators had turned red.

“They’ve cut the northern cameras.”

Marcello dropped the cigar and checked his magazine as automatic fire ripped through the garden. Bullets hammered the stone exterior and tore through the lower windows. A lamp shattered in the hallway. Wood splintered from the doorway beside my shoulder.

I moved toward the kitchen before thought could catch me. I dropped below the windows and crossed the room on my hands and knees. Glass cut through the fabric over one knee, but the pain barely registered. The women were in the kitchen. That’s all that mattered.