The Dark Elite (The Dark Elite 1)

Just like we practiced last night, I think, grasping my father’s arm. I can feel him shaking slightly, which makes a small smile cross my lips. My father is never nervous. Only a few times in my entire twenty-two years have I ever seen nerves get the best of him.

“You ready, Dad?” I ask, not taking my eyes off the church door in front of us. Everything I see has a soft filter around it, the white veil covering my face giving the world an almost ethereal glow.

“I feel like I should be asking you that.” He grips me a little tighter and I feel him turn to look down at me. “You’re not nervous at all?”

“Nope. Got all my jitters out already.” I give him a reassuring smile just as the doors open and the first strains of the Wedding March begin on the piano.

Even though my dad and I have been living a simple life for the past six years, my wedding certainly isn’t small. The shuffle of people turning in the church pews to watch my father and me walk down the aisle sends a new jolt of nerves through my stomach, but when I meet Brian’s eyes from across the church, everything settles.

There he is. This is right.

Brian doesn’t know my full history. He knows that my father and I had a rough year before I started college, but he thinks it was money problems and not anything to do with running from the mafia.

I suppose I should feel bad for lying to him, for keeping things from my future husband, but my father has ingrained that habit in me since the day we left Chicago. It’s not safe for anyone to know who we were before we became the Taylors. The surname Weston has been scrubbed from every part of my identity, and I’ll never go by that name again.

Soon enough, I’ll take Brian’s name anyway, and I’ll be one more step removed from the girl I used to be.

My soon-to-be husband beams at me as I walk down the aisle toward him. He looks as handsome as ever—classically attractive, well-built, blue eyes, blond hair.

His smile grows lopsided as I approach the dais at the front of the church, one corner of his lips lifting higher than the other in a grin I know so well. I smile back, hoping he can see it through the gauzy film of my veil. I don’t know what I was so nervous abou—

Crash!

There’s a burst of sound, and my steps falter. My entire body tenses at the sudden loud noise.

I flinch as my father instinctively pulls me behind him.

My heart lurches in my chest and my knees nearly buckle at the sight of the suited men who suddenly fill the church from all sides—behind us, in front of us, to each side.

And when they look at my father, I know they’re not here to speak now or forever hold their peace.

2

Grace

Pop! Pop! Pop!

The pop of gunfire is not a sound that should be at my wedding, and the sharp noises make me freeze in shock for a half-second. It isn’t until I begin to register the sounds of screaming around me that I grasp the reality of the situation with awful clarity.

Something is wrong. Terribly wrong.

A hum of adrenaline crawls over my skin as another round of shots ring out. The world seems to move in slow motion, and I can see and hear and feel everything more intensely than I should be able to.

Bullets zip across the room like angry bees. Wood splinters and cracks as gunfire hits the pews, sending people scrambling for cover.

My father grasps my arm so tight it hurts, and it’s that bite of pain that shocks me out of my stasis. He seems rooted to the spot just like I was, color draining from his face as he watches the scene, registering the group of men we were never supposed to see again. After six years of running, the demons of our past seem to have finally caught up to us—a day that was never supposed to come.

We’re standing in the middle of the room, halfway up the aisle, and I throw myself to the floor, yanking him down with me as another volley of bullets flies through the air.

There are so many intruders in the church, and I can’t tell if they’re firing at us, the wedding guests, or each other. But it doesn’t matter.

It’s no coincidence they’re here in this church on my wedding day. They came for Dad. For us.

You told me we would be safe now.

I look over at my father, tugging his arm to try to pull him behind the cover of a wooden pew. It was foolish to believe the Novak Syndicate would never find us, but I still feel a stab of betrayal, like my father lied to me.

“Dad—”