Chapter 24—Milly
Chapter 24— Milly
T he annoying consistent beeping is what pushes me out of my slumber as I wake up. Or try to wake up. My eyes take longer than I want to open, and everything fucking hurts, but I refuse to give up. If I can open my eyes, then I can get my ass out of this place and find Ollie. If I’m still alive, then so is he. Or he better be.
I’ve never gone after someone for revenge, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Ivan probably assumes he won. Thinks I’ll nurse my wounds and not be willing to get up and fight, but that asshole knows nothing about me. I’ll fight for Ollie even in death. If I were a damn ghost right now, I would absolutely haunt his ass. My willpower to keep that kid alive and out of Ivan’s hands is even stronger than the Grim Reaper’s.
The lights piss me off, but then I realize it’s the damn sun that’s shining through the window, and I glare at it. How dare it be shining so brightly when life is full of shit right now. The world should weep that Ollie is in the hands of his abusive father. But no, life goes on, and no one cares.
I sit up, yelling in pain but not caring to be quiet. No reason to be silent. I swing my legs over the bed and see the amount of bandages, then say fuck it in my head as I go to stand and fall flat on my ass. I curse at my lack of strength but try to use the bed to lift myself back into it. The damn beeping seems to be getting worse, and I choose to rip the damn thing off the wall before I make a move to get up.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Ruby exclaims as she bursts through the door and sees me pulling at the needles in my arms. She rushes to me, swatting my hands away easily, as just getting this far took far more energy out of me.
“Getting the fuck out of here. What does it look like?” I take an embarrassing length of time to get that out, as I have to stop and take a couple breaths between every few words. Who the hell ever thought it would be harder to talk than walk?
“Like you’re trying to kill yourself. Come on.” She easily lifts me back onto the bed and starts looking over the machines as I give her wide eyes. She glances at me from the corner of her eye, probably feeling me look at her. “What?”
“You on steroids or some superhuman?” I know I’m small, but I’m full of muscles that I’ve earned from my years on the run and at the gym with my brothers before all this mess started. I’m not lightweight, yet Ruby lifted me like I was a toddler.
She shrugs. “I’m going into physical therapy. Got to take the weight of people double and triple my size if I plan to help them. Last thing I want is some ass to fall on their face and blame me for not catching them because they took one step too many before they could walk. Saw a friend of mine get sued right out of college for that. Court even sided with the guy who fell and didn’t consider that he weighed over three hundred pounds. Most people couldn’t have held him up, especially considering he was too big for his own feet. School is already going to take forever to pay off. Don’t want any extra to go to court costs when I start banking the cash. ”
The beeping stops, and I rest my head back on the pillow, closing my eyes to the world. “What happened?”
“Ivan stormed the castle,” Ruby says with a sadistic chuckle. I hear her move around the room, and then I open my eyes and find her sitting in the only chair.
“How many—” I cough, and she stands quickly and hands me water from the table beside me. I drink from the straw, then rest back against the pillow. “How many did we lose?”
I know Ivan is a sick bastard. Any asshole who rapes and kills his “wife” while his kid’s watching, keeping him locked in a hot car for God knows how long, is born sick. Some might say you learn it, and maybe some do. But not Ivan. He was born fucked up. And a man born that way finds like-minded people, or weak-ass ones, who he can mold into mini-mes. Even if I didn’t see Ivan on-site—he’s not the type to get his hands dirty unless it involved Mia—he was the mastermind behind this. His orders were probably to get Ollie. Everyone else was collateral in his eyes. Women, children—all expendable to him.
I expect the tears in her eyes. This is her family. Any loss will be hard on her. But the shutdown? The complete lack of emotion? That lets me know it’s worse than I could have ever imagined.
“Just one.”
I wait. I can’t bear to ask, afraid of which boy I’ll ask about first. The one I fell in love with when he was born, or the one who’s slowly capturing my soul.
“Law.” Her voice cracks as she says it. The only break in her emotions. The only sign that it’s affecting her at all. The fact that she calls him by his club name and not her dad speaks more than anything about how shattered she is by this.
“Oh, Ruby.” My voice quivers for her.
The door bangs open again, and I’m all but blubbering as Ollie runs in and jumps on the bed. The beeping starts again, as does the pain as he knees me in the side. I remember getting shot a few times, but the pain of each one is worth having my kid in my arms.
“How? How did you get away?” I hug him so tightly, and he squeezes me even tighter. You’d think that this is common for us, but Ollie has so many hang-ups that he only gets close like this a few times a year. And I cherish every one of them. This one more than all the others because I really didn’t expect to have him in my arms so soon.
“Bass,” Ollie says into my neck. “He saved me. He’s my friend.”
His words pull more tears from me. Of course that man would go after my kid. He and Ollie created a bond quickly. Not sure if it was because he was the first man Ollie ever spent any real time with or if it was their love of video games. Who cares what it was—I’m just happy that they have it. If they didn’t, I doubt Bass would have gone after Ollie. My family wasn’t even willing to go to bat for my kid. They knew the risk and what he meant to me, but they still chose to keep themselves out of war.
But if Law’s dead, the president of their club, maybe they didn’t have a choice.
“Yo, kid, off the merch. Your mom is still healing,” Casper says as he enters the room .
“Don’t listen to him.” I pull Ollie tighter to emphasize my point. Not that the kid is going to listen to Casper. He listens well, but when it comes to choosing between me or someone else? I always win.
I put my head in the crook of Ollie’s neck and squeeze him enough that he grunts. He could have been the one I had to be stoic for, like Ruby.
I peek out at her, but she’s lost in space, looking over everyone’s head at the clock. Doubt she even knows the time. We aren’t close, but I appreciate that she’s here. She must have a ton to do with the funeral, or maybe she’s just avoiding it. God knows I would if roles were reversed.
“How you doing, Yank?” Casper asks.
“Brooklyn,” Ruby says quickly, and I smile for the first time since I woke up.
“Brooklyn,” Casper corrects as he gives his former president’s daughter a once-over before returning his attention to me. “How’s life?”
“I feel like I got shot.”
“You did.” General walks into the room with a white lab coat on. The eyebrow raise I send him earns me a shake of his head. “Don’t start. Just because we’re here, don’t think I won’t make you hurt. There are a lot of things I can or can’t give you to make your stay here comfortable. So do yourself a favor and try to keep that Yankee sass inside that head of yours.”
I fold my lips together in a show of keeping them sealed, but I also cross my fingers. Something Ollie sees as he readjusts to sit beside me and less on top. Looking up, he smiles at me before he snuggles down deep. I breathe in his scent as I look at the good doctor.
Before he can even do more than open his mouth, a roar erupts down the hall.
“Where the fuck is my sister?” That voice is something from my dreams. There’s no way it’s from who I think it is. “Get the fuck out of the way.” But the more he speaks, the more tears slowly flow down my cheeks.
“Fuck you, mafia boy. I don’t take orders from you.” I recognize Chains’ voice as he barks at my brother.
“You either take the order or you take the bullet my brother is about to put in your head.”
“If it’s Tommy holding the gun, make sure the safety’s off this time,” I say loud enough for everyone to hear as I rub my eyes with the back of my hand that Ollie isn’t leaning on.
A face I haven’t seen in years pops through the open door enough for me to see him. “Low blow, sis. I was sixteen.”
“Mama always said excuses were like fathers—everyone has one, but only a few really matter.”
The youngest of my brothers, and only two minutes older than me, walks in the room. He and I were the only ones who got Mama’s dark brown hair. The rest of my brothers took the dark black roots like our father. True Italians, they used to say, while me and Tommy just played at it. Not that you can tell the natural color on either of us. I dyed mine, and he did the same, but he was always more colorful than me. And this time is no different, with his blue mohawk on full display.
“Well, that one counted and was true. How goes it, nugget? ”
I cough a few times before answering. “No one calls me that, and I’m just dandy. How about yourself?”
“Shut it.” Vinny pushes Tommy out of the way, walking in and taking all the air from my lungs.
I knew seeing my family, my brothers, again would be hard. Didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But seeing Vinny? The head of the family since Dad died when I was seven and he took control of the familia at age twenty-one?
I’ve looked up to him all my life. He’s been more father figure than older brother. But he never crossed the line with telling me how to do things. He showed me options, pointed out what he would do, but he never forced the decision I chose. Even when it came to Ollie and Mia, he told me he would be there when he could, but he wasn’t going to risk everything. I got it. I really did. But seeing him here, coming after all this time of me being on the run, getting shot—repeatedly—and almost losing Ollie… well, I might just love the big fucker a little bit more.
“What happened?”
“Nice to see you too,” I say with a smirk that has him smirking, too, and his shoulders visibly sink back to normal. Vinny is many things, but one thing he will never be is a man able to watch his baby sister cry and not crumble. My sass eases some of the worry around his eyes as well.
He looks me over, no doubt noting every bandage he can see, and then he looks at Ollie. They’ve never met before. He heard about him, but when the whole thing happened, Vinny was running the syndicate. He didn’t have time for shaking hands and kissing babies. He dealt more with those hoping to take charge ’cause they thought he couldn’t handle it. All of them are probably dead now, since Vinny was never dethroned—and with my brothers at his back, he never will be.
He holds out his hand, offering it to my kid. Ollie takes a second before he shakes it. “Thanks for watching my sister. I owe you.”
Ollie has no clue who or what my brother is, not in the grand scheme. I might have talked about my family, but I didn’t go into details about what they did. Some things just don’t need to be shared. Like the fact that what my family does and their connections brought Ivan around and led to him to my bestie, Mia.
“Okay.”
The group chuckles, and it’s only then that I notice the room is packed with the Leone family and the Hounds. Well, a few Hounds. I notice a certain one missing, but I say nothing about it. Don’t want to come off needy when I’m not. Or at least I don’t think I am.
“What’s the diagnosis?” Bobby asks, always the one to get to the point, as he adjusts his glasses on his face. The only tell that he’s worried about me. He only messes with his glasses when’s there’s a problem he can’t fix by working the numbers out.
While Vinny might lead, Bobby, the second oldest, is all about the facts and numbers. He gathers the data for Vinny to use to decide how things will go, while Danny is the one who makes the examples of anyone who gets out of line. And Tommy? Well, Tommy and I were the two who usually caused problems. But we helped pick up the mess… most of the time. Before I left, Tommy was doing PR for the familia—meaning he was talking to everyone, putting his ear to the ground. Ev eryone trusted Tommy and usually told him more than he should know. Which Vinny used to his advantage, of course.
“Why not ask me? I am the one lying in the bed, after all.”
Bobby looks over at me and rolls his green gemstone eyes. They always remind me of a bird’s with how bright and big they are. Of course, the kids back home used to tease him mercilessly until Danny started knocking heads. Even at six, it was clear he would be Vinny’s enforcer, even though he was the third oldest and nine years his junior.
“Well, do you even know?”
I push out my lips and then stick my tongue out at him. “I got shot.”
“Obviously,” Danny grunts from his post at the door. He won’t come closer, not when he doesn’t know if an enemy will attack or not. A man of few words, but he’s protective to the core.
“Seven times, to be exact,” General supplies.
“Seven?” I shout in disbelief, along with both Tommy and Vinny. Vinny looks pissed, while Tommy looks jealous. We always were the competitive type. Might be a twin thing. Or just a Leone thing.
“Two in the upper right thigh, one in the gluteus, two in the stomach, one in the left shoulder, and one at the left ear. That’s more of a nick than anything else, but we still classify it as being shot,” General reads off a chart he pulled from the end of my bed.
“Ha, you got shot in the ass,” Tommy says with way too much delight.
I glare, but it does nothing.
General keeps talking, ignoring the jokester of my family. “The ones in your lower half were easy to pull out. The shoulder went through and through. The two in the stomach did some damage on the inside that took us a while to fix. That’s why we’ve kept you pretty sedated the last couple of days to make sure we stopped the internal bleeding. You’ve ruptured your stitches twice, moving around so much in your sleep, so we doubled down on the dosage to keep it from happening a third time.”
“I’ve been here for how long?” I knew I was out of it, but I figured for a few hours. Forty-eight at the most. But the way he talks about, I know he means more.
“Six days, to be exact.”
“Six,” I repeat in a whisper. I’ve never missed time before. Not even after a night of drinking did I wake up without the memory of what happened. But six fucking days of no memory? That seems absurd to me.
“You mean eight.” I look at Vinny, confused, but he’s staring at General. “She was shot eight times.”
General looks up from the chart with a head tilt, glancing from my brother to me. I see when the light bulb goes off in his head, his eyes widening before he nods. “That one on her arm was from before, not what brought her in.”
“Before? How many more does she have?” Bobby asks.
General looks back at the chart, flipping a few pages. “Three more that we can confirm, just based on the scars and the damage. I had my team look her over and fix what we could. Most of the scars are too old for us to fix, but I believe we counted seven stab wounds. We also reset the nasal fracture she sustained when she came in. ”
“Is she free to move?” Vinny’s words have me stiffening, as I can feel the anger radiating off him from his voice alone.
“I want to keep her here another day or two now that she’s awake, but after that, she’s good to go for at-home care. She’ll need some physical therapy on both her leg and shoulder, but I don’t see why she can’t do that from anywhere.”
“No, she can’t,” Ruby says, and everyone looks at her.
I don’t miss the once-over Tommy gives her. Probably why he’s the first to speak.
“And why’s that, beautiful?”
Such the charmer.
“Because Bass promised he would bring her Ivan’s head. And he’s not back yet.”
I shake my head, completely confused by what she’s saying. “Bring me what? Where is he? Why do I need anyone’s head? Yeah, I want Ivan dead, but what the hell am I to do with a head?”
“They make good wall art,” Danny supplies. If it was anyone else, I would laugh it off. But he’s likely serious as hell.
“Bass promised you. He sat in this chair and promised you that he would take care of it so you and Ollie wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore,” Ruby continues.
“When did he say that?”
“Before he left.”
“Left to go where?” Bobby asks.
“To Russia,” Casper says, and the damn beeping starts up again.