He Chose Her, I Chose Myself

"Hold still.

"I'm going to get a dressing on this, but the wound is bad. You need a hospital and you need that bullet out now."

The medic, Sal Bruno, took his scissors and cut away my coat, stiff with dust and blood.

The bullet had come within a hair of punching through the bone, and the flesh had been torn wide open.

A ragged gash four inches long lay exposed to the air.

On my right wrist, the rose bracelet — the engagement token binding the two families — had been driven deep into the raw flesh.

Sal worked it free, and the pain went through me like a drill until I couldn't stop shaking.

On my phone screen, thirty-eight missed calls from Riccardo.

"Valeria..."

Riccardo came running toward me from across the lot, his face full of panic.

He had almost reached me when a weak voice spoke up.

"Riccardo, my heart hurts so much."

Loredana pressed a hand over her chest, her face white as paper.

Riccardo stopped dead, hesitated, and then walked fast past me to the woman behind me.

I put out a bloodied hand and caught the hem of his trousers.

"Riccardo, I've been shot."

"How did you get hurt this badly?"

Riccardo looked down and only now seemed to see the wound with the flesh turned out of it, and his eyes filled with pain.

But behind him, Loredana's ragged, suffering breaths came one after another.

"My heart hurts, I can't get any air..."

Riccardo pulled his leg out of my grip. Not hard. Just absolutely.

"Baby, I have to go.

"Loredana's the foster daughter my mother values most, and this is a delicate moment for her. If word gets out that I left her in danger, the whole Ferrante name is finished."

He bent and put a hurried, cold kiss on my forehead, then turned to the medic working on me, his voice low.

"Take care of her. If anything goes wrong — anything — your whole medical team answers for it."

Then he lifted Loredana into his arms, carried her onto the helicopter, and was gone.

I forced the words out through the pain. "A little trouble with her heart, or a gunshot wound that needs surgery. In your head, which one matters more?"

Riccardo's steps stopped, but he never turned around.

"Don't go imagining things. Everything I do, I do for the family."

Inside a single day, the ambush was all over the city.

I lay in a hospital bed, and out in the corridor the doctors and nurses talked, and not one word of it missed me.

"Did you hear? The Ferrante Don went to save his foster sister and left the woman he's engaged to lying there."

"Donna Camilla thinks the world of Loredana. Word is she means to bring her up as the next Donna Ferrante."

It felt like something blunt had been driven into my chest.

After my father died and the Santoro family fell apart for good, Riccardo had guarded me obsessively, and no photographer was ever allowed to catch the two of us in the same frame.

He said he'd only just taken over as Don, that he had too many enemies and no ground under his feet yet.

Keeping me out of the public eye was supposed to be about protecting my privacy.

And now the photograph of him carrying Loredana away was on the front page.

Tears slid down my cheeks, and I closed my eyes.

So his protection had only ever been a beautifully packaged lie.