Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty Six
Caterina
The machines breathe for him. That is the worst part.
Not the white walls. Not the sterile smell of the hospital room.
Not the bruises along his jaw or the ugly swelling around one eye.
Not the tubes and wires and clear bags hanging from metal poles.
Not even the bandage wrapped around his side beneath the blanket, hiding the damage that nearly took him from me.
The breathing.
The steady rise and fall of his chest because a machine is making it happen.
I sit beside his bed and stare at him until my eyes burn.
Adrian Donato should not be this still.
Even asleep, he is always aware. A hand within reach of a weapon. A slight shift at any sound. His body resting, maybe, but never completely gone from the room.
Now he is gone from the room.
Not dead.
I shudder. I will not think that word.
But somewhere unreachable, somewhere behind medication and injury and a tube down his throat that I cannot look at for too long without feeling like I am going to come apart.
They almost couldn’t get it in.
That is what the paramedic said while the ambulance was screaming its way to the hospital.
“Not sure if we can intubate. Might have to consider tracheostomy.”
The word terrifies me; the idea that his throat might be so far gone that they can’t get a tube in.
But they managed. They got the tube in, got him breathing, got him to surgery.
They stitched his side back together, but not the way Dr. Alfonsi had done it at Papà’s house. This time it was not neat and simple and handled with a bottle of antiseptic and an old family doctor shaking his head at Adrian’s stubbornness.
This time there were surgeons and an operating room and blood transfusions. More than one, even.
I have learned that there is a particular horror in hearing doctors discuss blood like inventory. Units, loss, pressure, response. Numbers that mean whether the man you love might live or die.
Two days later, they still have him in a medically induced coma.
Two days because they do not want to wake him yet.
His body needs rest, they say. His airway needs to stay protected. The swelling, the blood loss, the trauma, the strain on an injury that should never have been reopened that violently.
They explain it all very reasonably.
I understand every word.
Fuck reasonable. I want him to open his eyes and look at me.
I reach up and carefully brush a strand of dark hair away from his forehead.
“You’re going to be furious when you wake up,” I whisper. “So at least there’s that to look forward to.”
The ventilator hisses softly.
My throat tightens, but I force it down.
I am tired of crying, but I can’t seem to stop it.
I’m even more tired of people looking at me, concerned about my crying, so I’ve been a lot more efficient about it.
A few tears, wiped away before the next doctor comes in, before Teresa steps through the door, before Papà appears with that grief-stricken fury in his eyes and looks at Adrian like he owes him a debt he cannot repay.
I look back at the laptop balanced on my knees.
I should not be working in a hospital room.
Everyone has told me this, but I don’t tell them I am not working.
I am hunting.
The screen is full of documents, corporate filings, property records, old vendor agreements, insurance correspondence, board communications, shell companies stacked inside other shell companies, like someone deliberately built a maze for a person looking to get lost in it.
But not me.
I will not get lost. I cannot.
Because we have no one to question now.
The man Adrian kept alive for questioning is dead.
Because of course he is.
Because nothing can be simple. The one person who might have given us a name, a payment source, a handler, anything, somehow got injured badly enough in the chaos that by the time anyone realized what was happening, he was bleeding internally.
Gone.
One more body, one more dead end.
I do not know what Roberto and Antonio are saying to the police.
I do not know what story is being stitched together around the wreckage of my house, the dead men on my lawn, the armed security teams, the blood in my entry hall, the destroyed table, the children in the bunker, the fact that my siblings and I were almost wiped out in one night.
I should care.
I will care later.
Right now, Roberto can legal his way through hell, and Antonio can handle whatever digital and logistical nightmare comes next. Nico can rage, Vito can pace, Papà can terrify every person within a ten-mile radius.
I am focused on two things.
Adrian waking up.
And whoever did this paying for it.
My hand tightens around Adrian’s. His fingers do not move.
I stare at them, as if sheer force of will can make them curl around mine.
“You come back, damn you,” I whisper.
Nick and I got there in time to see the man on top of him. To see Adrian nearly gone beneath him. To see the blood in the grass and Adrian’s hand twitching toward his gun, too far away to reach.
I remember the sound I made.
I remember lifting Vito’s gun, aiming.
I remember the man looking up, and the smirk on his face, the pleasure in his eyes while he choked the life out of Adrian. He was enjoying it.
So I shot him, and I have no remorse.
Not then and not now.
Nick was moving beside me, covering the approach, shouting something I barely heard. The man fell away from Adrian, and I ran. I remember the wet grass under my feet. I remember dropping to my knees beside Adrian and putting both hands on his face.
Adrian. Adrian, look at me.
For one moment, he did. He looked right at me, then his eyes closed, and he went slack.
Then everything moved fast.
Nico came back from the east service road, saying the jammer was down. Phones lit up. Nick got through to his people. Vito got through to Papà. Teresa made the emergency call from the bunker the moment the lines came up, so sirens broke through the night only moments later.
Home care was not an option this time.
No couch or family doctor with antiseptic and stitches.
Hospital. Now.
And for once, Adrian was not conscious to argue.
That thought almost makes me laugh.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and force my attention back to the laptop.
Shell company. Property holding group. Private investment fund. Third-party hospitality vendor. Insurance inquiry. Regulatory contact.
I follow one thread until it splits into three. I follow another until it dead-ends into a company dissolved twelve years ago, then revive the name through an old address, an accountant, a trustee, a signature buried in a PDF scan so blurry it makes my eyes ache.
Someone thought being buried was enough.
They were wrong.
I have spent my life looking at numbers. Who benefits, who pays, who hides behind clean language and respectable letterhead.
This is what Papà never understood.
Power does not always come with a gun in its hand.
Sometimes it arrives as a filing, a contract, a vendor change.
Sometimes it smiles through polished teeth and waits for the men with guns to make everyone look in the wrong direction.
I look at Adrian, and the tube coming out of his mouth, the bruising on his face.
At the man who nearly died protecting not just me and my family, but his people. He left the safety of the bunker because his people were out there and needed him.
“No,” I say softly. “Not this time.”
My free hand moves to my stomach.
The motion is instinctive, though it has only been hours since I knew.
A checkup, they said.
Just to be safe.
Because I had scratches on my arm from the basement door. Bruising from this and that. Really, just because I had been in a violent event, and the hospital staff was very insistent.
So I let them.
Mostly because arguing took more energy than I had left, and I wanted to get back to Adrian’s side as soon as possible.
I expected questions. Bandages. Maybe a tetanus shot.
I did not expect them to tell me to pee in a cup.
Then bloodwork.
I did not expect a doctor to come back with a neutral expression and ask if I knew I was pregnant.
Pregnant.
The word still does not feel real.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, though there is nothing to feel yet.
Nothing anyone else would know unless I told them.
A life.
Small and hidden and impossible, existing inside me while Adrian lies unconscious in front of me.
I should be panicking.
Part of me is, I think. Somewhere. Underneath the fear for him, underneath the rage, underneath the shell companies and the hospital machines and the raw exhaustion.
I should be terrified of what this means.
Adrian is my bodyguard.
Adrian is in a coma.
Adrian has not told me he loves me.
I have not told him either.
Not while he could hear it, anyway.
Not when it would count.
And now there is this.
Something neither of us planned. Something that makes everything more complicated, more dangerous.
More permanent.
I should be spiraling.
Instead, beneath everything else, beneath the fear and grief and fury, there is something strange.
Contentment.
Not happiness. Not exactly. Happiness feels too bright right now, in this room.
But something settled and sure.
I do not know how Adrian will feel.
He is a soldier, a protector. A man who believes attachments create risk and hesitation.
A man who looked at Cristiano like the weight of the Conti legacy could crush a baby before he could speak.
A man who understands targets and bloodlines and what it means when enemies aim at family.
And now—
Now he will have a child of his own.
If he wants one.
No.
I close my eyes.
That thought hurts too much.
He will want this child because this child exists. Because for all his discipline and fear and rules, Adrian Donato protects what is his with everything he has.
And if he does not know how to feel at first, I will give him time.
If he wakes up afraid, I will understand.
If he wakes up furious at himself for not somehow preventing biology itself, I may actually laugh.
But for any of that to happen, he has to wake up.
“You have to wake up,” I whisper, my voice breaking now. “Because I am not telling our child that you died the day I found out about her. That would be morbid.”
The machine breathes for him.
I bend over his hand and press my lips to his knuckles.
“I need you,” I say against his skin. “And not because someone is trying to kill us. Not because I’m scared. Not because of whatever psychological explanation you would give if you were awake and trying to be impossible.”
My eyes burn again.
“I need you because I love you.”
There. The words are out.
Maybe no one heard them but me and the machines, but I said them.
I lift my head and look at his face.
Unchanged.
Of course.
I wipe my cheeks again, then reach for the laptop.
Because if he cannot wake up yet, then I can do the next best thing.
I can find the person who put him here.
As I follow the threads back to the source, a name appears on screen. I nearly scream in frustration.
It’s the third name I’ve seen buried under all these companies.
But I’m not ready to give up yet. I will find who did this.
I glance at Adrian, then down at my stomach, then back at the screen.
“You picked the wrong family,” I whisper.
And then I keep digging.