Chasing Stars - A Midnight Mafia Novel

Chapter Fifteen

IMPORTANT NOTE! We have returned to Katherine's POV.

A loud crash and the sound of glass shattering jerked me from my sleep and into an upright position. In seconds the gun from the nightstand had been completely assembled and in my hand. I took an irrational moment to marvel at how quickly I had assembled and loaded the piece. I examined the gun in awe at my own skill and determined that to make such a quick show of working the gun I was clearly far too involved in the mafia.

Another crash echoed through the walls and I pulled myself out of bed with my pistol at the ready. If I survived through this I would definitely brag about my gun assembly skills later, but right now it looked like I was going to have to put more than just the assembly part to test. I swallowed hard and paused at the door.

It was quiet. Eerily quiet. Simone and Silvano were often up late into the night playing cards or discussing matters. On several occasions I had thundered down the stairs in a panic when I heard the two yelling only to find them engulfed in a killer game of GTA. Even if Silvano wasn't here and Simone was asleep he always had the TV running, even in his sleep.

After a long moment of silence I turned the door knob slowly and opened the door a crack, thanking the heavens that Alessio was too anal retentive to let any of his doors open with a squeak, it would have been just my luck to have a noisy door be my cause of death.

Silence. I was imagining things. Dreaming. Dreaming vividly apparently. Hell, perhaps I was hallucinating all together. I popped my head out the door and looked down the darkened hallway. I stayed completely stationary wondering my best course of action here. I was probably going to die. I shouldn't be so surprised really, people die in the mafia business every day.

A loud thump sounded from downstairs followed by a series of destructive sounding whacks and crashes. Okay, so I clearly wasn't imagining things.

I turned the corner with my gun first, after securing the location I continued. The crashes got louder as I crept down the stairs. This didn't make sense. Where was Pietro? And Simone? Alessio had instructed I not be left alone. In fact, the house was never to be unguarded. This didn't seem right.

Just as I was rounding the corner to the kitchen a bottle flew past my head and crashed into the wall behind me, I'd just barely ducked in time. "Jesus-" I stopped just before I pulled the trigger.

Alessio was throwing some sort of fit, destroying everything he touched. Out of instinct, I'd almost shot my boyfriend. My shoulders sagged immediately when I saw it was only him, until he threw another expensive liquor bottle over his shoulder. This one was lower and I had to practically dive to the side to avoid getting clocked with it.

"Alessio!"

He whirled around to face me. His eyes were wide and blood shot and his clothes unkempt.

"Have you gone mad?" I asked part in cause of the havoc he was reeking on our house and partly because, well, he really did look like a mad man.

"Katherine." He dragged my name out just a few beats too long in a whine. He stumbled across the room and over broken pieces of dishes, bowls, and other various objects he'd picked up around the house and thrown to their demise. There were so many decorative pieces in the place, vases that held nothing, abstract pictures, knickknacks on a pedestal, if someone wanted to come in and destroy six figures in minutes they would only have to go through one room. The battered pieces on the floor were probably worth more than my car, even now as they were in pieces.

"What are earth are you doing? Are you...are you drunk?" In the three years I had known Alessio I had never once seen him drunk, not even tipsy.