The Mafia's Princess Biker Bodyguard

*Brianna*

The hairs on my entire body stand at once. I can feel it. Someone is watching me.

I tell myself it's grief. The courtyard is packed with my relatives, each one dressed in black, mourning the death of Luca Dimitrou, my father's uncle. The sky hangs low and heavy, with the stifling scent of wet earth and crushed lilies. The clouds are dark enough that the rain could break any second.

Women dab at their eyes. Men stand stiff with their hands folded, their faces carved from stone.

I step forward and drop a rose on the casket. The petals look too red against the polished wood. I hold my breath, then step back and take my place beside my father.

He doesn't move. He doesn't shed a single tear. His jaw is set, eyes unblinking behind dark designer sunglasses. He stares ahead as if the man in that box meant nothing, and I know better than to ask him why.

As the next in line to become the head of the Dimitrou crime family, I try to mimic his cold composure, but beneath my sharply tailored suit, my heart thumps wildly against my ribs.

My mind tells me to look up. So I do.

My gaze sweeps past the mournful faces of consigliere, soldiers, and teary-eyed aunts, wandering upward toward the gothic archways of the cemetery’s stone chapel.

And I see it.

At the top of the dark slate roof, a sudden glint of metal catches the muted light. Something is there. I gasp when I realize what it is—a rifle scope. A sniper, cloaked in black, is trained directly on my father's chest.

My breath catches in my throat.

"Father!" Panic tears from my throat, raw and sudden. Before I can shove him out of the line of fire, a suppressed crack splits the heavy silence.

The bullet tears through the chilly air with terrifying precision. A violent spray of crimson blooms across the crisp white front of my father’s shirt. The impact slams him backward into me, his heavy weight nearly taking us both down to the muddy turf.

For one stretched second, no one reacts. Then the courtyard explodes into screams.

Chairs crash. Women shriek. Men reach inside their jackets, shouting orders in Italian that tangle together until I can't distinguish one voice from another. People I had known since childhood collapse into the damp earth, their blood soaking the grass.

Someone grabs my arm and drags me forward as my father's guards close around his body, hauling him toward the cars.

"Brianna! Get to the cars! Move!" yelled Marco, my father’s chief enforcer, as he grabbed my arm, trying to drag me through the madness.

My mind was screaming; my feet barely kept up as we ducked through the crossfire. Bullets whined past my ears, chipping away at stone angels and sending clouds of pulverized marble into the air.

Marco shoved me into the back of a black sedan, sliding in right after me. "Drive! Go, go, go!" he roared at the chauffeur.

The door slammed. The engine roared. Through the window, I saw my father's blood on the cobblestones, and I couldn't breathe; I couldn't breathe.

The car lurched forward, then slammed to a stop so hard that my head hit the seat in front of me.

A truck was parked across the road, blocking our only way out.

"Go around!" my driver barked.

"There's no room!"

Gunfire erupted behind us. The back window shattered, and glass sprayed across my lap. I screamed, covering my head. The driver jerked, then slumped against the wheel, and the horn blared one long, endless note.

Move, Brianna. Move.

I throw the door open and run.

My heels are gone before I know it. The ground is cold and rough under my bare feet, and my black dress tangles around my legs.

People are running in every direction. Cars are smoking. Someone is crying, and someone else is begging; the whole place is a mess of broken glass, overturned flowers, and bodies I refuse to look at.

I don't know where I'm going. I only know that if I stop, I die.

Another shot rings out.

I turn my head, and my blood turns to ice. A man stands at the edge of the courtyard with his gun raised, the barrel pointed straight at me.

I can't move. My legs won't listen. I stare into that small dark hole, and I know, with a calm that terrifies me, that this is it.

A body slams into me from the side.

The breath explodes out of my lungs as I hit the ground hard, a heavy weight pinning me down. A bullet screams past where my head just was. I hear the stone chip behind me.

Above me, a man shifts. I catch a glimpse of a dark jacket, strong arms, and a jaw set like steel. He doesn't look at me; his eyes are locked on the shooter.

He pulls a gun from inside his jacket in one smooth motion and fires.

The killer's head snaps back. His gun clatters to the ground, and his body drops like a puppet with its strings cut. He doesn't move again.

Silence presses in on my ears, broken only by my own ragged breathing.

The man finally looks down at me. His eyes are dark, steady, and completely unreadable.

"Stay down," he says.

I stare at him.

Up close, he's all hard edges: dark buzz cut, a scar splitting the edge of one eyebrow, and eyes the color of autumn—amber and brown, like leaves just before they burn.

Ink crawls up his neck and spills out from the collar of his jacket, over his knuckles, across the backs of both hands. He's still on top of me, and he's still holding the gun.

The smoke from it curls between us.

He just killed a man. He killed him like it was nothing.

Reality slams back into me, and my head clears all at once.

"Get off me!" I shove at his chest with both hands, but it's like pushing against a wall. I twist, kick, and finally manage to wriggle halfway out from under him. I scramble to my feet and run.

I make it two steps before his arm hooks around my waist and yanks me back against his body. A rough palm clamps over my mouth, cutting off the scream I was about to let out.

"Quiet," he murmurs against my ear. "Do you want to tell every shooter in this place where you are?"

I fight him anyway. Clawing at his wrist, driving my elbow into his ribs, thrashing with everything I have. He doesn't even grunt. He just holds me there, his chest rising and falling steadily against my back, like I'm a stray cat he's trying to keep from bolting into traffic.

And then something inside me breaks.

The mask I've worn for months, the cold one, the one that says I'm Ilias Dimitrou's daughter and nothing frightens me, cracks straight down the middle. My father is bleeding on the ground. Marco and the others are gone. My driver is dead. Men are dying all around me, and I'm shaking so hard my teeth rattle.

My eyes burn. Tears spill over before I can stop them and slide hot down my cheeks into the edge of his palm.

"Please," I mumble against his hand, the word muffled and broken. "Please, don't."

He goes still for a moment.

Then I feel it, the faint curve of his mouth against my hair. When he turns me slightly and I catch his face from the corner of my eye, he's smiling. Not cruelly, but amused, as if I've just said something unexpectedly funny.

"Relax, princess," he says, low and unhurried. "I'm not here to kill you."