Borrowed Bride: Chapter 16

Gianna is gone.

Those three little words are scarred into my mind, surrounding my soul like barbed wire.

I woke up from an operation to have three bullets removed—two flesh and one internal—to find the woman I’d fallen in love with, the woman the world thought was my wife—was gone.

Anton found a note left on the windshield of the limo stating that watching me get gunned down so soon after Tara made this world far too real and dangerous for her. It broke her heart, and so she left.

Part of me understands. The fear I felt the moment those bullets impacted my body armor, and my world turned black, was chilling. I was out for two days and woke to a missing wife and a missing father.

Every person I know is on it, searching the entire city for any sign of them because neither of them are safe. Whoever took my father is asking to be sent to the bottom of the ocean in an oil barrel, but Gianna? She flees to be safe, but I know for a fact she isn’t. Not after what happened to Tara. This Cherry woman has proven herself dangerous and she’s shot to the top of my hit list.

“Anything?” I bark at Ben as he enters my office with a phone in hand. “Have you found her?”

“No,” Ben replies quietly and he hands me the phone. “But we found your father.”

“Leo?”

“Nah, a smaller family. The Ricci’s? They’re based on the outskirts and as far as I can tell, they have ties to no one.”

“But they kidnapped my father?” I mutter, scrolling rapidly through the information on the screen. “A bold fucking move.”

“Yep. But we know where they are keeping him. Frederick is already there, waiting for the go ahead.”

“No.” I hand the phone back to Ben. Too much has happened without me there to witness it: my father, Tara, and now Gianna. “I want to do this myself.”

Carnage isn’t a cure for heartbreak, but it’s one hell of a distraction. Ben drives me to my father’s location, and my men surround the building when we arrive. It’s an old abandoned bakery with a sign hanging by just a few threads. The thought of my father, the great Dante Barrone, being held in a place as shoddy as this is almost laughable.

I kick down the door, raise my handgun at the first asshole I see, and open fire. Nothing stops me. Rage pours over me like molten oil, seeping from every vein and flooding from every pore. Too many people are screwing me over, and there’s too many things I can’t keep in control of.

Do people not see me as a threat anymore? Do they think I am someone that can be messed with like this? This Cherry woman, and now an outskirts family daring to kidnap my father?

No one survives.

They fight back and I’m glad they do. I punch faces to pulp, shoot entire clips into the chests of others, and rip and tear my way through every pathetic guard that’s stationed between me and my father. They snatched him from a restaurant where he was just eating dinner, and each day he has been missing is a day they could have grown bored and killed him.

I yell his name until it bounces off the walls as my own reply, drive a crowbar through the gut of someone who tries to tackle me down the stairs, and shoot three men with the last of my bullets. Then I kick down the last door and find my father bound to a chair amidst old, moldy sacks of flour.

My heart stops.

His head is down. His chest is motionless.

My heart crumbles further. I take the steps two at a time and charge toward my father, dropping to my knees as soon as I reach him.

“Dad?” There’s a wound on his forehead, surrounded by dried blood, and his skin is pale but when I touch his cheek, he lifts his head and the tension snaps in my chest like a rubber band.

“Marco?”

“Dad, holy fucking shit, you scared the crap out of me.” I pat his cheek, studying his tired eyes. “The fuck happened? When was the last time someone got the jump on you?”

Dad coughs roughly as I move around him and untie the rope keeping him down, then I slide an arm around him and help him to his feet.

“My son,” Dante coughs. “They told me you’d been shot. That you were in the hospital, dying.”

“I’m fine,” I assure him. “I was shot but my armor took two of them, and I’m on so many painkillers I can’t find the third.”

“My boy.” Dante clasps my cheek and wheezes, then he straightens up. “I am so relieved to see you alive.”

“Me too.” Once he is steady on his feet, I pull my father into a crushing hug that makes both our bones creak.

“Give me a gun.” A nearby guard meets Dante’s request. “We have to kill the rest of these fuckers. I ain’t letting some scumbag, lowlife family think they can snatch a fish as big as me and get away with it.”

“You’re speaking my language,” I reply, seeking out a fresh magazine for my gun.

“What’s wrong?” Dad stops in front of me and his pale eyes weave across my face. “Something is wrong.”

“Gianna,” I say tightly. “She’s missing.”

“Someone took her?”

“No, she uh …” I almost don’t want to tell him. When it was just me, I could tell myself that I would find her before the pain became real. Telling my father brings that pain into my reality, and I don’t want to hear his I told you so.

“She left.”

Dante’s eyes narrow. “I told you this would happen, marrying outside of⁠—”

“Don’t,” I snap, pushing past him. “Are we gonna kill the rest of these fuckers or what?”

“Sir.” Ben approaches through the door, his face twisted into an expression I can’t quite read. Something between excitement and dread. “We’ve found her.”

My entire body stalls like a snapshot and I wobble, half up one step. “What?”

“Facial recognition flagged her at an airport. Her name wasn’t on any of the manifestos, so we checked the private charters, and we found her.”

“Take me there,” I demand. “Take me there right now!” As I move to sprint back up the steps, my father catches my elbow with a surprisingly strong grip and pulls me back.

“Marco, you can’t be serious. What about the Ricci’s?”

“She’s more important,” I snarl, jerking my arm free. “I have to get to her. I have to talk to her, explain⁠—”

“Explain what?” My father’s face darkens. “She’s an outsider, Marco. You knew this. She’s not worth shit. Look at the mess she brought with her, huh? A street rat bringing her messy life into ours like it means nothing. Your maid got shot, you got shot. This here is a real problem, I was kidnapped for fuck’s sake!”

“We don’t know who shot me yet,” I grind out.

“That’s beside the point. Why do you think the Ricci’s were bold enough to attack me, hm? Because we’ve slipped. Because you disrespected everyone with that rat⁠—”

His words end when my fist slams hard into his face, sending him reeling backward into Ben. “Don’t talk about my wife like that,” I snarl, then my furious gaze moves to Ben. “Take me to the fucking airport.”

Ben doesn’t need to be told twice, and he leads me down to the car and then tosses his phone into my lap as he drives.

The picture of Gianna on the screen makes the rest of the noise in my head fall silent. She looks sad, pale and strained. I don’t blame her for running. I don’t blame her for being scared, but I need to talk to her, to show her I’m okay and that I can protect her.

I stare at her narrow eyes, the slope of her nose, and the slant of her chin. She’s dressed much like she was when she first met, and I can only assume she found an old contact to help her get on this flight.

Each beat of my heart is like dragging myself through razor blades. Each breath scrapes my throat and she is my only focus.

I need to tell her I love her. That I will do everything in my power to protect her.

We reach the airport two minutes before her flight is due to depart and Ben doesn’t need to be asked to drive straight through one barrier and onto the tarmac itself. He seems to know where he’s going, and in any other situation, I would applaud his preparation, but right now, Gianna is my focus.

We race down the smooth tarmac, gliding toward our target and narrowly avoiding several public planes. Ben races us through another fence and we skid onto the tarmac of the private planes where a single, solitary plane sits.

No, not sits. It’s moving.

“Drive!” I yell at Ben, unsure what the hell we can do but as Ben slams his foot down on the accelerator, the plane lifts off the tarmac and glides into the sky like a white dove. Ben slams on the brakes and I stumble out of the car before it’s even fully stopped, tripping over myself as the love of my life is carried far away.

“Gianna!” I scream, as if my voice could somehow reach the plane that takes her further and further away from me with every passing second.

The ground rises quickly and I crash to my knees as the remaining shards of my heart crumble into dust.

I lost her.

What have I done?