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Raze stepped closer.

“Until tonight, this was business.” He looked toward the bodies again. “Tonight changed that.”

Unease entered the prisoner’s eyes.

Raze leaned down until only inches separated them. “Now I want their houses emptied. Their money burned. Their names removed from every door they ever believed belonged to them.”

The prisoner swallowed.

“I want their sons afraid to inherit what remains and their allies killing one another for the chance to surrender first.”

Raze straightened. He nodded to the guards.

“Take him downstairs.”

Two men seized the prisoner beneath the arms and dragged him upright. His boots scraped across the bloodied stone. As they pulled him past me, his attention shifted toward Adriana.

“You should have returned the drive when they asked.”

I moved between them. The prisoner leaned far enough to look around my shoulder.

“Now everyone here will die because of you.”

Adriana’s face was pale. Her fingers trembled at her sides, but she met his gaze without lowering her head.

The guards hauled him up again and dragged him toward the house.

Around me, the family drew together.

Raze returned to Izzy and placed one hand against Rose’s back. Tone stood close enough to Archie that their arms touched, the contact the only thing holding the last of his violence in place.

Samira refused to release Marcello even when the doctor tried to move her aside.

Adriana still stood beside me.

The Coccicos had come to prove they could breach our walls. They had succeeded. What they failed to understand was that the walls were never what held this family together. Glass could shatter. Stone could break. Men could bleed across the floors. But the family remained.

They may have attacked our home, our family. But in doing so, they had awakened the man I buried beneath ten years of prayer. By sunrise, the Coccicos would remember why men once called me the Saint.

37

ADRIANA

Glass covered the floors. It glittered beneath furniture, caught in the folds of curtains, and crunched under the boots of guards moving between rooms. Bullet holes marked the plaster. One wall in the den had been stripped back to the stone where gunfire had torn through it.

Everywhere I looked, someone was working.

Medics treated the injured in the dining room, where the long table had been cleared and covered with white cloths, bandages, and open medical cases. Marcello sat at one end of the table with his shirt cut away from his wounded arm.

Samira sat by his side while a doctor cleaned the bullet wound. She held his uninjured hand with both of hers. Marcello watched her instead of the needle entering his skin.

“You’re hurting me,” he whispered quietly.

Samira looked down at their joined hands and loosened her grip.

“Sorry.”

“I don’t want you to stop.”