Chapter 35 Giovanni
GIOVANNI
Every time a nurse passes the waiting room, my heart rate spikes as fast as my chin jerks up, and I brace for news that never comes. Time stretches cruelly and endlessly as I bob my leg like a crack addict overdue for a fix.
I don’t even know how I got to the waiting room. One minute, I was in the ER. The next, I was seated on a hard plastic chair with my elbows on my knees, and my head in my hands.
Anger burns in my chest, but underneath the rage is a fear so potent it’s the equivalent of acid in my veins. I’m fucking terrified. What if the doors open and good news doesn’t walk through them? I won’t survive the agony my father has endured over the past thirteen months.
Not hearing Valentina’s laugh again or feeling the movements of her curves under my hand when she quivers in ecstasy will kill me.
If she’s no longer in this world, I won’t be either. There are no rewrites for my story. No part two. I’m the fucking penguin with his perfect fucking pebble.
It’s only given out once.
Finally, the doctor who wheeled Valentina away hours ago appears. His expression is calm, but his eyes are stormy. I reach him in less than a heartbeat, and my brothers rise with me like a force ready to fight the injustices of the world.
“She’s stable.” His confession releases the pressure valve in my chest. “We controlled the bleeding by removing one of her fallopian tubes and are managing the complications of OHSS with medication.”
“Where is she?” Concetta asks, reminding me that she’s here.
I’m not avoiding her on purpose. I’m just too caught up in my worst nightmare to drag anyone else into the mess. I thought I handled pressure well. Tonight has proved me a liar.
The doctor glances at Concetta and smiles. “She’s in recovery.”
My throat burns when Dante reminds me it wasn’t solely Valentina’s life on the line tonight. “And the pregnancy?”
Remorse blisters through the doctor’s eyes. It discloses everything.
While not all is lost, things don’t look good.
Grief claws at my chest, but the sheer relief that Valentina is alive soothes its wounds. “Can I see her?”
“Soon,” the doctor answers, alerting me that I asked a question.
Silly me.
“I want to see her,” I correct.
“Soon,” he repeats. “She’s still under anesthesia…” His words trail off when I arch a brow. I wasn’t asking permission to see Valentina. I’m telling him I want to see her. Those are two very different things.
His throat works hard to swallow before he briefly nods. “Okay. But only one visitor at a time. She needs time to recover.”
My brothers nod in understanding. I stand my ground.
“Two.” I curl my hand around Concetta’s shuddering one before tugging her forward so she stands next to me.
I was furious she didn’t immediately heel to Valentina’s request for her to stop.
Then I remembered who she was dragging her away from.
Tomasso is a worthless piece of shit. He’ll trade his own daughter for some coin, so there’s no way I’d let him anywhere near Valentina.
Concetta must be of the same belief. Although I would have handled things differently, a parent doesn’t have the same crutches as a partner. “Two visitors this time.”
Again, the doctor surrenders. “Very well. Follow me.”
It takes only one glance at my brothers for them to move forward with correcting the injustices that occurred tonight. I’ll join them the instant Valentina is out of the woods. She comes first.
She will always come first.
It’s business as usual for the Caruso realm when Matteo leads the pack of wolfhounds out of the hospital while shouting, “It’s party time, boys!”
Excluding the steady beep of monitors, the room Valentina is recovering in is quiet.
Tubes snake from her arms and under the sheet, and a heart monitor shows the safe rhythm of her pulse.
I move to her side and take her hand in mine.
It’s warm now. Thank fuck. For hours now, I’ve been suppressing the urge to go on a rampage.
It was close to bubbling over, but one brush of her skin against mine and the viciousness of the tornado consuming me downgrades from catastrophic to an EF3.
“I’m here, tesoro,” her mother whispers from the other side of her bed as her thumb strokes her left hand. “I’m not going anywhere, so you take all the time you need to rest. It’s my turn to take care of you.”
Valentina’s eyelids flutter, and I swear a ghostlike smile twitches on her mouth when I correct her mother’s promise. “It’s our turn to take care of you.”
Hours later, in the silence of the ICU room Valentina was recently moved into after recovery, Concetta uses the alone time to interrogate me. We had a dozen nurses and doctors between us in the recovery unit, so this is her first opportunity. “Did you know Valentina was planning to sell her eggs?”
Too shocked to remain tight-lipped, I shake my head. She said she knew Valentina was pregnant because a mother knows, but I didn’t know motherly instincts stretched this far.
“Did you?”
Her eyes lock with mine, and they shimmer with unshed tears.
“I suspected,” she says softly. “She didn’t tell me.
I found a prescription for gonadotropin the first night she didn’t come home from her interview.
” She returns her eyes to Valentina, who now looks like she’s sleeping instead of fighting for her life.
“I wasn’t snooping. I just needed to know you were okay.
” Her hand tumbles when she runs it down Valentina’s cheek.
“I wanted to ask you, but I didn’t want you to feel ashamed.
” A broken sound escapes her. It’s jagged and bitter.
“I also didn’t want to explain how I knew what gonadotropin is administered for.
” With six short words, she underhandedly announces who her daughter got all her good qualities from.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures.” A huff rattles in her chest as she returns her focus to me.
“If only they were interested in fifty-five-year-old, overcooked menopause eggs, then maybe this could have been avoided.”
Laughter whistles from my nose. It’s unexpected, but it lowers my agitation a ton. I hate what Valentina has gone through and what she still has to face, but if she hadn’t gone to the clinic on that specific day, I could still be scrounging the streets of Carlisle, trying to find her.
Concetta cuts off the peculiar sensation bombarding me by reminding me I still have a minefield to tiptoe across before I’m close to putting this chapter of my life to bed.
“Who was that lady earlier? The one in the ER? I know she was at the dinner party, but anytime I went to introduce myself, she scuttled off.”
Not wanting even a snippet of frustration to hinder Valentina’s recovery, I guide Concetta to the corridor outside her room before answering. “That was Valeria Giuffrida.”
“Giuffrida,” she whispers, as if testing the name out to see if it’s a good fit.
When her brows furrow, stumped, I ask, “Do you know her?”
Her headshake isn’t overly convincing, so she adds words to the mix. “It’s probably for the best. I would have hesitated slogging her with my bat if she were the daughter of someone I know. Now my conscience is clear.”
Before I can assure her a clear conscience isn’t needed for someone like Valeria Guiffrida, the doctor who saved Valentina’s life joins us in the corridor. I owe him everything, and the way he walks like his head is shoved up his ass announces he knows this.
He can strut. If he asked for my soul right now, I’d hand it over without blinking.
“Signor Ca—”
“Please, call me Giovanni.”
He hesitates, then bobs his head. “Giovanni… We ran an urgent blood workup to check the function of Valentina’s kidneys and found something concerning in her bloodwork.”
My recently cooling temper peaks, but I leave the floor to him, realizing sometimes muscle isn’t needed in cases like this. Strength is.
The doctor’s expression hardens. “She had a high dose of strychnine in her system. In the past, strychnine was administered to treat human illnesses, but today, it’s mainly used as a pesticide to kill rats.
Symptoms of strychnine poisoning usually overcome a patient within fifteen to sixty minutes.
If you hadn’t gotten her here as fast as you did…
”—he exhales slowly like his following words are as hard for him to deliver as they are for me to hear—“she wouldn’t have made it.
” He glances toward Valentina’s room as a professional mask slips over his face.
“I need to order additional tests. As you saw, strychnine poisoning causes extreme negative health effects, so I need to make sure we didn’t miss anything. ”
“Wait.” My commanding tone freezes him halfway into the room. “How was it administered?”
I’ve heard of strychnine before, but only when running a street dealer out of Palermo for mixing it with LSD, heroin, and cocaine to make the hit faster for his customers.
Faster and deadlier.
Palermo had a record number of drug-related deaths that year.
The doctor flips through Valentina’s chart before scanning her notes. “It was ingested.”
Ingested? He must be mistaken. “That’s not possible. I ate the same things Valentina did. We shared the same plate, for fuck’s sake, and I feel fine. Am I angry? Yes. Furious? Fucking oath I am. But do I look like a man who was recently poisoned?”
My pulse pounds in my ears as I replay the night in my head.
There were some incidents where the itch to kill trekked through my veins, but they were more jealously based than foiling an attempted murder.
A handful of the serving staff were too admiring of Valentina’s curves.
I took care of the main culprit, and Dante handled the rest.
Suddenly, my jealousy lifts enough for clarity to seep between the cracks. “The cake. She didn’t want to share her cake.” I whip around and lock eyes with Concetta. “Who gave her the cake?”
Her brow furrows. “What?”