Married To The Mafia...?

I was a deer caught in headlights.
A helpless naive animal captured in a blinding situation.
A situation which was life or death.

I stared at Ethan as if he were insane. As if at any moment someone would take him in a straight jacket, kicking and screaming out of the penthouse and downtown to the white wash buildings and padded cells. 

He had allowed Gabriella to stay in our hotel, he had allowed the possessive daughter of one of his criminal counter parts to sleep between sheets just a few floors beneath ourselves. He had thought he knew her, only know we were learning he in fact didn't at all. Gabriella was in love with Mason. In love with the man who hunted and obsessed over my blood. The man who shot my father on my wedding day, the one who was biologically my brother.

Ethan's eyes ripped from the screen of his phone, his hand quickly extending toward me. I pushed my brows together in confusion.

"We have to get out of here." his voice was final, not that I wanted to argue against the notion in the first place.

Quietly I slipped on my shoes and slid my hand comfortably inside his own. I felt restless as he dragged me toward the private elevator, my heart racing when I could have sworn I'd seen the heavy blinds move slightly behind us. I contemplated telling Ethan, making his search like my father used to for the boogeyman but quickly I pushed it aside as being paranoid.

We paused slightly as his fingers pressed the small simple silver button. The chime whistling above our heads, the metal doors shaking as they pulled apart, my blood running a dry cold instantly.

"What's wrong?" his voice was amused, his eyes curious. "You don't seem happy to see me sister?"

Mason Samuels was a psychotic maniac. I as well as everybody knew it. His eyes were always filled with a crazy glint, his body long and lean contorting into animated shapes and poses. But it was his smile that made my heart race. Not the kind of race that ethan seemed to evoke whenever be was around, the kind of race where it drew my blood cold.

I could feel my feet stepping backward, my words completely lost with the amount of fear mixing through my system. The back of my legs brushed against the back of the couch and I paused, faintly aware of being a deer in headlights, faintly aware of Ethan drawing a gun from within his jacket.

"Uh-uh" Mason was too quick, too edgy, to prepared for all of this. Within second he had stepped three paces inside the hall, a silver gun aimed, poised and ready at my head. "Put it down Ethan, unless you want another funeral on your hands."

Ethan instantly dropped the gun in his hand, the black metal echoing as it felt against white tiles. I swallowed hard, tears building behind my eyes. I felt Mason shove me roughly toward my husband and his strong arms immediately enveloped me. My face hurried in the fabric of his blazer, my small hands clinging to the cotton of his fabric as his lips brushed against my head. It would have been the perfect moment, a sickly sweet image of two people madly in love, like the old couple who cling to each other in Titanic. Only a click broke us apart.

Mason smiled widely at Gabriella, her body wandering from somewhere else inside our penthouse. 

"For such a high ranking hotel, your security is appalling." Her lips lifted into a snarl, her eyes wicked as she held yet another fun to our direction. "Even after my father had told us the security codes, the actual men hired to make sire you were safe, they never even put up a fight. They were too easy."

My stomach lurched. They had killed anyone and anything they stood in their way, we were just sitting ducks, their next helpless victims.

"What do you want Mason?" Ethan's voice was calm, even with death staring straight at him. There was no visible sign of fear as he leaned against the back of our sofa, his arms still wrapped around me protectively. 

"It stopped becoming a matter of what I want when I killed my father Ethan. It became a matter of what I could do, what boundaries I could cross." He was wild, "It became revenge. Revenge on the people who ruined my chances."

"You never had a chance here Mason."

"You're wrong!" I clung to Ethan's shirt as Mason's voice grew even louder, "I would have had a chance, I could have been something in your precious world if it weren't for her."

Never in my life had I been so scared of my life as the second the words left his mouth and eyes lay viscously over my body.

"She stole everything! My mother and father were happy before she came along. They were mine. Then their precious Amelia was born and everything changed. My father had even more pull inside this stupid underworld, he had so much power that they killed my mother." Tears pooled in my blue eyes, I already knew most of this story. "He sent me away, across the country. But he sent her to London. He faked only her death and brought her home when be was worried somebody had found out. He never brought me home!"

"Mason she was a baby." Ethan's voice reveal how crazy Mason had become. "There was nothing she could have done."

"You're wrong." His eyes were sparks of light. "She could have died with our mother."

I felt a weight drop, a circle of dancing waves of nausea surround everything around me. They say that as you die, you're life flashes before your eyes but as Mason raised his gun an inch higher toward my trembling body the only thing I felt was the weight upon my left ring finger, the symbol of love and the feeling of arms around me. In an instant it was ripped away, Ethan's hands shoved hard against me sending my body sprawling away, falling backward and my head cracking against something as I landed.

Two gun shots echoed over everything before I became the deer struck by headlights.