All Chapters of Married to the devil of valtieri: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

He arrived at noon, in a white helicopter, on the lawn of the old estate.Nobody had told him where to land. Nobody had told him they would be there. He simply came down out of the clear blue sky with the sun glittering on the rotors, and set the skids on the grass where a blackened east wing still smoked in the heat, and sat there for a full minute, with the engine winding down, as though inviting them to come and look.They were all there. Dante stood at the head of the steps, in a dark suit, with his hands at his sides and his face like carved stone. Isla stood beside him, holding the baby. Serafina and her agents lined the drive, with their guns held low. Tomas and Marco and Van Hoek had gathered under the cypresses. Mirelle held Nico by the hand.The helicopter door opened.A cane came first. It was ebony, with a silver head. Then a polished shoe. Then, with the unhurried grace of a man stepping out of a limousine, a figure climbed down onto the grass and stood in the sun, adjust

"Everybody down," said Serafina.It was the only warning they got. She did not raise her voice. She simply drew both pistols from her coat, in a single flowing movement, and fired two shots into the air.The terrace erupted.Isla dropped to her knees, with the baby clasped to her chest and her body curled round it. A bullet snapped past her ear. Somebody screamed. Dante's hand closed on her collar and hauled her sideways behind the broken colonnade, and a hail of fire raked the stones where she had been standing."Not all of them!" Serafina was shouting, somewhere to the left. "Not all of them are his! Marco, get Mirelle! Tomas, the child!""Nico!" cried Mirelle."I have him!" It was Van Hoek, astonishingly, with a small boy tucked under one arm like a parcel, running bent double across the terrace with his white hair flying. "I have him, madam! I am rather quick, for my age!"The world was noise. Chips of marble stung her face. The fig tree shuddered. Through the smoke she saw Ettore

Aldo Pallas knew a surgeon.It was the only thing anyone remembered afterward about that terrible hour: the way the old driver rose from his crate without a word, took the keys of the stolen launch from his pocket, and said, in his flat gravelly voice, "Eleven miles. A retired naval man. He owes me." Then he was gone into the dark, and Isla pressed her hands down on a wound she could not see and counted the beats of a heart she could barely feel."Stay with me," she said. "Serafina. Stay.""Bossy," whispered the detective."I learned from the best."It took Tomas and Marco to keep her still. It took Mirelle, who turned out to have trained as a nurse before Nico was born, to cut away the shirt and pack the wound with clean linen. It took forty minutes by the cottage clock, and every one of them lasted a year. At twenty to five, with the first gray light creeping under the door, a boat bumped against the jetty, and a stout bald man in a fisherman's jersey came stumping up the shingle wi

They went in at two in the morning, in the black dark of a moonless night.There were four of them. Dante, in a dark sweater, with a shovel strapped across his back. Isla, in trousers and a black jumper, her hair tied up in a scarf. Marco, with a hunting knife and a very bad attitude. And Aldo Pallas, silent and enormous, with a flat gray cloth cap pulled down over his eyes."There are three guards at the gate," he murmured. "Two in the house. A dog.""A dog?""Cesare. He is a mastiff. He likes bacon."He held up a paper parcel. Marco stared."You brought bacon.""I drove for Giovanni for twenty-two years," said Pallas, with great dignity. "I know where the dog sleeps."The estate looked different by night. The ruined east wing was a black hole against the stars. The great hall, however, had been lit. A dozen windows glowed gold, and from the terrace came the faint chink of glasses and the low drone of men's voices, like bees in a hive. Ettore Moretti was entertaining."They're drinki

They did not get far.The palace gates were blocked by two black cars. A dozen men in dark suits stood in the courtyard, fanned out among the cypresses, with their hands inside their jackets. A priest in a red-trimmed cassock hurried across the gravel, wringing his hands, and cried that His Eminence was unwell, that no one should disturb him, that there had been some dreadful misunderstanding."Back door," said Isla."There's no back door.""There's always a back door."There was. It was a small, green, iron-studded door at the end of the kitchen passage, behind a stack of wine crates, locked and rusted and quite forgotten. Tomas put his shoulder to it. It gave with a shriek of hinges. They tumbled out into a narrow alley that stank of cabbage and cats, and ran.It was a fine, mad, joyous chase.It wound through the oldest quarter of the town, a maze of steep cobbled lanes and covered stairways and little squares with fountains, and she knew it as she knew her own pulse. She had walke