Twisted Bonds (The Camorra Chronicles 4)

“Are you all right?” Nino asked, cupping my cheeks with his bloody hands and kissing my cheek, my forehead, my temple then my lips before he pressed a kiss to Alessio’s head.

I nodded dazedly. “But you’re not. You need a doctor.” Nino’s gaze wasn’t as focused as usual. I grabbed his bloody hand and squeezed. Blood was still sliding out of the cuts. I pressed down on his wrist wound but the red on his upper arm spread quickly. “Nino, you need to treat this.”

Nino still stared at me as if he worried I’d vanish into thin air any moment. “It’ll take a long time for me to bleed to death from a wrist laceration of this depth.”

“Nino,” Remo rasped, kneeling beside their mother who was sprawled out on the ground in a pool of blood, Adamo’s knife still stuck in her belly. She was gasping for air. Adamo sat in her blood, chest heaving. Savio hunched next to him; he was pale. The hit to his head and the blood loss were taking their toll.

“Go,” I whispered to Nino. “Go to Remo.”

Nino released my hand and slowly made his way over to his brothers. They were all covered in blood, still losing it from the cuts on their wrists.

Fabiano staggered toward me, bleeding from a cut on his forehead that hadn’t been there before. “We need to get you out of those clothes and wash the gasoline off.”

I nodded but couldn’t take my eyes from the four brothers gathered around their mother. Remo curled his hand around the handle of the knife, then Nino closed his own fingers around it. Remo looked at Adamo who gave a shaky nod, then at Savio who tilted his head in agreement. And then Remo and Nino changed the angle of the knife and jabbed it the rest of the way in. Their mother jerked, then the tension left her body, and relief flooded me. I clutched Alessio closer to me, breathing out.

Remo gripped Nino’s shoulder, said something then jumped up and disappeared into the garden, storming toward Fabiano’s mansion.

Nino staggered to his feet and walked toward me. His expression was beautiful ice, shut off from his emotions, and maybe it was for the best right now. Adamo closed his mother’s eyes and let his head fall back, staring up at the ceiling.

Nino touched my arm. “Remo’s on his way to the panic room to check on Serafina and the twins,” he said emotionlessly. My eyes took in the blood trail leading out onto the terrace. Nino squeezed my hand and I glanced down toward his wrists, still dripping blood. “You need to shower, get rid of the gasoline,” he urged.

I motioned at Fabiano. “Fabiano, Adamo, get bandages. We need to make pressure bandages to stop the bleeding until the doctors arrive.”

Fabiano lowered his phone that he’d been using to alert the Camorra doctors and ran off.

“Kiara,” Nino murmured. “You need to shower.”

I peered into his eyes, determined, worried. He wouldn’t relax until I did, I could tell. “If you let Fabiano and Adamo dress your and Savio’s wound.”

After Savio had stumbled to his feet, he sank down on the armrest of the sofa and stared down at his hands, one of them clutching one wrist as the other kept bleeding.

Fabiano returned with two first aid kits, and thrust one against Adamo’s chest. “Get up and help. Now.”

Adamo stumbled to his feet and with a last glance at their mother, he walked over to Savio. Fabiano made Nino sit down but his gray eyes were only on me.

“We’re okay. You have to be okay too,” I said, then quickly moved upstairs and into our master bathroom.

Alessio had stopped crying as I rocked him. The moment I stepped into the shower with him and the warm water rained down on us, he started again. I began humming as I tried to wash the gasoline out of our hair and skin. Soon my sobs broke through the melody and I had to stop.

“Shhh, Alessio, shhh. Everything is okay now.”

It took ten minutes to get clean, not just from the gasoline but also the blood sticking to our skin. When I turned the shower off, I froze. Nino sat on the edge of the tub and was watching with a haunted expression.

He was covered in blood from head to toe.

He got up slowly, grabbed two towels and handed one to me so I could wrap Alessio in it. Once he was swaddled, I handed him over to Nino, then dried myself. Nino’s eyes rested on mine. His bandages were already turning pink.

“You need to be stitched up.”

He sighed. “I almost lost you today. I’m sorry, Kiara.”

“Why are you sorry? It was your mother. You slit your wrists to save me and Alessio.”

“I promised to protect you, to keep you two safe, but today I failed. I won’t ever again. I won’t ever hesitate to kill someone I deem a threat.”