Four days after taking a job in a mob boss's mansion, an innocent kiss on his cheek made his hand slam into the wall beside my head.

The blinding glare of the twin searchlights pierced through the salt spray, pinning our battered speedboat against the churning black canvas of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The harsh halogen beams cut straight into my retinas, turning the world into harsh silver and blinding white. Before my eyes could even adjust, the rhythmic, deafening clatter of a heavy caliber machine gun tore through the roar of the gale.

"Get down!" Luca’s voice cracked like thunder over the wind.

With strength that defied the grave bullet wound in his shoulder, he lunged forward, his heavy arm wrapping around my waist and dragging me violently to the reinforced deck floor. An instant later, a stream of high-velocity lead chewed into the fiberglass hull directly above where my head had been, sending shards of resin, plexiglass, and severed wiring raining down on our backs like shrapnel.

Beside us, Leo threw his entire weight against the steering console. The wheel spun violently under his white-knuckled grip, throwing the vessel into a hard starboard drift. The wake exploded into a towering wall of white foam that temporarily caught the searchlights, scattering the beams into an iridescent curtain of mist.

"Leo, hard left on the breakers!" Luca shouted, coughing violently, a fleck of crimson staining his pale lips. He pushed himself upright against the passenger bulkhead, hauling his heavy automatic rifle onto the rim of the gunwale with his good arm. His face was ghastly, illuminated in sickly flashes by the muzzle fire of the approaching hunter boats, but his dark eyes burned with an icy, merciless clarity. "Do not steer for open water! They have commercial-grade interceptors! They will run us down in three minutes!"

"Where then?" Leo screamed over the shrieking engine. A burst of bullets smashed the port-side navigation light, showering sparks across his forearms. "The whole coastline is jagged rock!"

"The Devil's Teeth!" Luca snarled, racking the slide of his weapon with one fluid, practiced motion against the edge of the dash. "The sea caves beneath the old lighthouse! Take her between the shoals!"

"Are you insane?" Leo yelled back, though his hands were already reacting, wrenching the throttle forward into maximum overdrive. The twin twin-turbocharged engines groaned, surging with raw horsepower, hurling our bodies back against the deck as the bow lifted into the raging surf. "No one navigates those shoals in the dark! It's suicide!"

"It is their suicide if they follow," Luca replied coldly.

He rose to a half-kneel, his jaw clenched against agony that must have felt like a molten iron spike driven through his collarbone. Through the salt mist, I watched the larger of the two enemy boats closing in fast—a matte-black tactical patrol craft bristling with armed men. High on its prow stood a gunner manning a mounted swivel rifle, adjusting his sights directly for our cockpit.

My heart seized in pure, suffocating terror. I reached out, my fingers curling into the drenched fabric of Luca's shirt. "Luca, don't! You're bleeding out—"

He didn't pull away. Instead, his hand briefly found the nape of my neck, his thumb pressing with fierce, desperate reassurance against my racing pulse. "Keep your head down, Elena. Trust your brother."

Then he turned and fired.

Luca did not waste rounds on a wild spray. Even shivering from shock and soaked in freezing seawater, his shots came in disciplined, rhythmic pairs. *Crack-crack. Crack-crack.*

Across the black water, eighty yards out, the gunner on the lead boat suddenly jerked backward, his arms flailing as he tumbled into the churning wake. The heavy machine gun swung loose, chewing uselessly into the stormy clouds. An instant later, Luca redirected his fire, putting four consecutive armor-piercing rounds directly into the glass bridge of the vessel. The boat swerved erratically, its hull clipping a half-submerged granite reef with a catastrophic screech that sounded like tearing sheet metal.

"Hold on!" Leo's warning was swallowed by a deafening roar as our boat struck a cresting wave and went airborne.

We slammed back down onto the water with bone-jarring violence. My teeth snapped together, the metallic taste of blood filling my mouth, but Luca’s iron grip kept me from being thrown overboard. The cliffs of the mainland rose before us like the jagged jaw of a colossal beast, black granite spires rising straight out of the foaming abyss.