Chapter 15
Raze
I stood in the doorway and watched Tone work.
She moved with a steadiness that didn’t match the anger in her eyes—hands sure, voice soft, body positioned between Izzy and the world like instinct had taken over.
Tone wasn’t officially a doctor. She’d grown up around men who came home bleeding and pretended they didn’t.
She’d known how to clean wounds and how to keep her hands from shaking when it mattered.
Which is how she ended up in nursing school.
Tone had always liked competence. She liked knowing things.
Fixing things. Being the calmest person in the room when everyone else was panicking.
So she trained hard, graduated, worked her way from nurse to surgical assistant, standing shoulder to shoulder with surgeons who barked orders and assumed they were the smartest people in the room.
And she was good at it. Very good.
Right about the time she had the title, the respect, the spotless white coat and the future mapped out in neat little hospital shifts… she stepped back and decided she’d found a different calling.
Serving the underworld.
Which, translated, meant Tone preferred being a lady of leisure with surgical skills rather than clocking into fluorescent lighting and institutional coffee at six a.m.
She didn’t miss the rigid routines. The hierarchy. The endless paperwork. The polite way doctors asked questions they already knew the answers to.
Now she lived on her terms.
She still patched people up. She still stitched flesh and stopped bleeding and assessed damage with the same steady hands.
She just did it in guest bedrooms instead of operating theatres.
Because the family had a tendency to acquire injuries that didn’t pair well with hospital intake forms. Injuries that raised inconvenient questions. Questions like:
How did this happen?
Who shot you?
Why is there a bullet lodged two inches from your spine?
Hospitals were for accidents.
Tone specialized in complications.
And if she occasionally preferred a silk robe and late mornings to scrubs and pagers?
Well. She’d earned that luxury.
Izzy sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched forward, hair tangled and damp with sweat.
There was a split at her lip, swelling already, and a thin line of blood tracking down her temple from a shallow laceration near her hairline.
Bruises were blooming under her sweatshirt like ink spreading beneath paper—collarbone, upper arm, the soft underside of her jaw. Fresh. Angry.
She didn’t look at me much.
Somewhere along the way, someone had taught her that breaking down in front of people was a liability.
That tears were weakness, and composure was currency. That if you wanted to survive, you learned how to swallow the hurt and keep your spine straight.
She’d absorbed the lesson too well.
No one had ever sent the follow-up memo—the one that informed her she didn’t have to be brave every minute of the day. That strength wasn’t measured by how much pain you could carry without letting it show. That sometimes falling apart was the only honest response.
But she sat there anyway, jaw tight, holding herself together like it was her job.
Like she didn’t know she was allowed to let someone else hold the weight for once.
That, more than the injuries, made something in my chest tighten until it felt like it might snap.
Tone dabbed at the cut with antiseptic and Izzy flinched. She hissed out a breath, then gave a small shake of her head like she was annoyed at herself for reacting.
“Sorry,” Tone murmured.
“It’s fine,” Izzy choked out, voice rough.
Tone gave her a look that said don’t lie to me, then reached for gauze and pressed it carefully to the laceration. “It’s not deep,” she told her. “But you’re going to have a headache. And this is going to bruise.”
Izzy swallowed. “I’ll manage.”
I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides.
I wasn’t angry in theory. I wasn’t simmering in abstract outrage. I was staring at physical proof that someone had put their hands on her, and the rage that came up in me was old, familiar, and utterly unmanageable. The kind of rage that didn’t want justice. It demanded payment in blood.
I kept my face still. I’d mastered that. But inside, I was already deciding what to break first.
Tone glanced toward me without turning her head. She could feel it. Like she always did. “Don’t,” she warned softly, like she was speaking to a dog that was about to slip its leash.
Izzy’s gaze flicked up at that, quick and wary.
I moved closer, because the distance between us suddenly felt immense.
“Who were they?” I inquired, voice low.
Izzy’s mouth tightened. “I didn’t recognize them.”
“Did they say anything?”
She hesitated. The pause wasn’t evasive. It was memory—dragging itself back up, ugly and sharp.
“They wanted to know where Nathan was.” Her fingers tightened around the blanket bunched in her lap. “Apparently, he stole something of theirs.”
Drugs.
The room didn’t change, but I did. Something in me went colder. Cleaner.
Tone finished cleaning Izzy’s lip, then sat back on her heels, studying her face. “You need to sleep. I’ll check in on you in a little while.”
Izzy nodded, but she didn’t move. She looked exhausted. Her eyes kept flicking to the door like she expected it to burst open again.
Tone’s expression softened. “I’m going to sit in here for a bit, until you drift off.”
Izzy gave a small nod.
I remained by the door another beat, unable to leave and unable to stay without making it worse. I wanted to touch her. To check the bruises myself. To see exactly where they’d hurt her.
I didn’t.
I didn’t get to take liberties with her body just because someone else had. That line mattered.
I left and closed the door behind me.
The second it clicked shut, the house felt like a cage.
I walked down the hall and into my office, slammed the door, and stood there with my hands braced on the desk, head bowed.
I’d sent her back.
I’d known she was vulnerable, and I’d sent her anyway—because Tone had convinced me, because it had felt like the right thing to do, and I’d told myself it was the smallest mercy I could offer her.
Mercy.
What a stupid word.
A sharp knock sounded on the door. Tone walked in without waiting, her face drawn tight with the kind of guilt that made people stubborn.
I didn’t look at her. “This is on me.”
Tone shut the door. “No.”
I finally lifted my head. “I let her go.”
“You let her go because I pushed you. Because I told you it was the right thing to do. So don’t you dare stand there and hoard all the blame like it’s yours to own.”
That made something twist. “I’m her captor,” I bit out. “I dragged her into my world, and then I dropped her back into hers like it was safe to do so.”
Tone’s eyes flashed. “You couldn’t have known.”
I laughed once, ugly and short. “I never should have let her leave.”
Tone leaned against the desk, arms folded, her voice lower now. “You didn’t know. I didn’t know. And now she’s hurt, and we both have to live with that.”
She wore the guilt like a talisman—like if she held it close enough, it would prevent the worst from happening again.
My jaw tightened. “I want names.”
Tone nodded once. “Then get them. But don’t go in there and make her feel like she’s a problem.”
I didn’t answer.
Because she wasn’t a problem.
She was a person who’d been punished for loving the wrong man. And I was going to return that pain to the men who’d delivered it.
By the time Tone went back to sit with Izzy, I had men in cars heading for every haunt Nathan Azzopardi ever crawled through—every bar, every backroom, every cracked apartment where small-time dealers liked to feel important.
I sent them to the clubs the Nato boys frequented too, not because I thought Navarro Nato had broken his word, but because I needed confirmation.
And because I needed blood in motion.
My head of security gave me updates in clipped bursts.
There was no sign of Nathan. No sighting. No whispers. No burner pings. He’d vanished. Either he was dead, or he was hiding like a coward. Either way, he’d lit a match and walked away from the fire he started.
That left me with the men who’d come to collect.
I sat at my desk, stared at my phone, and made the call.
Navarro Nato answered on the second ring, like he’d been expecting my call.
“Cavalho,” he greeted me. Calm. Assured. Almost amused. “I assume this isn’t a social check-in.”
“Tonight, someone put hands on a girl under my protection. Nathan Azzopardi’s girlfriend.”
He paused for a moment, and I couldn’t tell whether he was surprised or simply calculating his response.
“That’s unfortunate,” Navarro’s tone was careful.
“It’s more than unfortunate,” I countered. “I want a meeting.”
Silence again. Then a low breath. “Where?”