Jesus. Is that true?
“I know,” he agrees, and hell. I can’t begin to wrap my head around this. She kills people? I mean, Gabe called her an assassin, but I thought of that more as a term, not a fact.
She holds up her knife but fishes out her gun from her back waistband. “Let me finish it. It’s my right after what they did to Samil.”
The man gives her a very long look, and she must see something in his eyes because I hear him intake a sharp breath a second before his face is blown out the back of his skull. Blood and bone and God only knows what else are sprayed across my face and side, and I collapse to the floor from the force of everything, unable to breathe, unable to fucking think.
That bullet was so close to my face I felt the goddamn air displace and sweep along my cheek from it. I wipe my face with the sleeve of my shirt, but it doesn’t matter. It’s everywhere. My eyes clear, and Marcella is holding a gun, a pissed-off scowl on her face.
She just blew the guy’s face off because he had a gun to my head and was about to kill me with it. Or was about to out her. I honestly don’t know what she’s doing or what she’s capable of or how she’s even thinking of me in this situation.
“Hide your weapons,” she hisses hastily. “Hands behind your backs, and don’t argue with what I say. Do it now! Signoria!” she cries out.
I get to my feet, but before I can go to her, the woman I saw this morning from the hotel appears, and instinctively, I put my arms behind my back. Gabe does the same.
Marcella sighs dramatically and lowers her gun. “Fucking asshole,” she gripes.
“Marcella? What on earth? What is this?” The woman waves a disgusted hand toward the dead man before her eyes widen as she takes both Gabe and me in.
Marcella faces the woman. “The king is dead,” she announces without preamble. “And can you instruct your henchmen in the future not to point guns first and ask questions later? It got his head blown off.”
She brushes back her long bangs from her face with her gun hand. The knife is still open in her other hand, down at her side.
The older woman is completely perplexed.
“What is happening? What are you doing here, and why is Cristo dead?”
Marcella scowls. “I killed the king. He caught on to me the moment I returned to the palace, and I slit his throat. The prince and his man chased me out of the palace, and I took them down, used their zip ties to bind their wrists behind their backs, and brought them here for us to dispose of after we torture secrets out of them. Then fucking Cristo had to point a gun at me and go to shoot.”
Cristo has a gun in his hand, and since he’s dead on the floor, he’s got no argument.
“Marcella, how did you know we were here?”
“Antonia,” she replies as if the answer should be obvious.
“Antonia?” the lady parrots, incredulity in her tone.
“I called her and told her what happened. She told me to come here to regroup and await further instruction.”
The woman eyes both of us with our hands behind our backs. “You brought them here?”
“To kill them. I had no choice. Believe me, it wasn’t my first option.”
Fuck, is she deadpan. Shit. I believe her, and it’s rattling me.
“Did anyone else follow you?”
She shakes her head. “No. It was only them.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Gabe snarls.
Marcella snorts a laugh. “Honey, it’s done. No one is coming for you. There is no rescue.”
“But you killed my driver?” The woman is all but ignoring us.
Marcella pans a hand at the man on the ground. “Signoria, he’s had it coming for a long time, and we both know it. But he pointed a gun at me and went to shoot. So yes, I killed him.”
Signoria doesn’t look upset, just annoyed. “That’s a ten-thousand-euro rug he’s bleeding all over.”