"Willow, no," Digby interjected. "It's a trap. She's brought them here."
“Of course she hasn’t. Don’t be ridiculous!” Willow let out a peal of suspicious laughter.
"He's right," Gemma said triumphantly. She had every reason to be bold and brave, for Angelo and Bobby were not far behind her. "It is a trap. I did bring them here. It's revenge for leaving me to be killed."
"Stupid, common wench," Digby growled. "You've signed your death warrant and ours."
Gemma opened her mouth, cocky and spirited reply at the ready. But Digby was not there for the witty repartee. He was terrified of being recaptured, and he was ready to sell his life dearly, gun at the ready.
"Don't!" Willow outstretched her hand as if elegance and arrogance could stop bullets.
"You know she can't walk out of here alive. She knows too much. This was always the plan."
He pulled the trigger.
The first shot caught Gemma in the midsection and sent her stumbling backward. The second was more precisely aimed. Gemma did not hear it coming. She did not feel it hit her. One moment she was, and the next, she simply was not.
Angelo and Bobby had not been far behind, but bullets were so much faster than men. A few steps may as well have been a mile as far as they were concerned.
"NO!" Bobby's cry of rage heralded most merciless unloading of his weapon, shot after shot ringing out. Overstuffed upholstery gave up its interiors in cascades of white puffy clouds which danced amid red arterial bursts.
This was wrong. This was all wrong. Angelo had been feeling the wrongness in his gut from the moment Mark's call came saying they had been exposed. Now that feeling was screaming full volume, and it was almost too late to listen.
Gemma was down, blood spreading from her torso in a disturbing pool. Bobby was trying to get to her, but that was a mistake Angelo would not allow him to make.
He grabbed his boy and dragged him down the hall just as several armed men came bursting out of practically everywhere. The closets, the cupboards, even the fucking fridge swung open to reveal soldiers.
It was a trap within a trap. They were not meant to survive this; that much was obvious by the way bullets rained across the walls, ricocheting like mad because the fools attempting to take them had not taken into account the fact that stone-walled Greek mansions were not going to absorb bullets. Instead, they were redirecting them at high speed.
Angelo had not come without a plan. He did not walk into any room without having multiple exits in mind and strategies on top of strategies. The mansion was cliffside, as all truly expensive mansions were because erosion did not matter when you had more money than God. That meant there was always a way out. That way out just happened to also be a way down.
A very long way down.
He’d scoped out a room which jutted out over eternity, and he knew the way. It took seconds to reach at a full run, but when Bobby realized what the plan was as they stood at the magnificent floor to ceiling window leading out onto a small balcony, he resisted.
"We can't leave Gemma! We have to get her out!" Bobby screamed, trying to fight his way back. But there was no time to get Gemma. The soldiers were coming, heavy boots making the walls ring with fury. Angelo had not been this close to death in quite some time. He was not going to lose Bobby to these men. Neither capture or death were options.
"Forgive me, boy," he growled, grabbing Bobby by his shirt and hauling him toward the gracefully arched window which looked out over the calm Aegean sea.
"Angelo, what the fuck…."
He threw Bobby off the cliff, then jumped after him. Together they fell, white and blue flashing around them, cliff, water, sky, cliff, water, sky, cliff, sky… SPLASH!
"FUCK!" Bobby surfaced from the water with a feral cry of rage.
They were both pulled into a speedboat by a waiting extraction team and jetted away among the many inlets and islands surrounding the area.
Far from being thrilled at their near-death escape, as he usually would have been, Bobby was furious.
"We left her behind. We left her to fucking die. We could have grabbed her."
"If she has any chance of survival at all, it's if one of those armed soldiers was also a medic. And there's a much higher chance of that being the case than us being able to save her while we were falling out of a window."
"We're getting her back, Angelo. I don't care about the others, but we're getting Gemma back."
"Bobby, she was hit twice…."
"We are getting her back. Alive, or…"
"Very well," Angelo acquiesced. He knew better than to try to talk Bobby out of this. The boy would go mad if he weren't allowed to say goodbye, and an insane Bobby was the last thing anybody needed. "We will find her. They'll have to take her to hospital one way or another."