Chapter 23 Dante
DANTE
The hospital corridor smells of antiseptic and stale coffee.
It clings to the back of my throat, coating my tongue in a sterile aftertaste, nothing like the salty air of Sicily or the iron tang of blood I’m more accustomed to.
I walk the length of the hallway outside once, twice.
Hell, maybe three times. I lose count somewhere between the fourth flicker of the fluorescent lights by the vending machine at the end of the hallway and the fifth time my reflection glared back at me in one of the glass windows.
The full truth is that I needed distance from the sight of her pale against those white sheets and the IV lines snaking into her veins, from the way Luca curled into her uninjured side like she might disappear if he loosened his grip for even a second.
Every time she winced in her sleep, every shallow breath she dragged into her lungs, it felt like someone was carving another piece of my heart out of my chest and roasting it over an open flame.
I have endured gunshot wounds and broken bones.
I have watched my brother bleed out in my arms and have felt the betrayal of a family friend being the one to pull the trigger.
None of it compares to sitting in that chair and listening to machines breathe for her.
At no point was I certain she would wake up.
Not when I saw how much blood she lost. My hands had been slick with it by the time Leo and Romano got to me. My hands that had been pressing uselessly against that wound while she stared past me already fading hadn’t stopped shaking until hours after we arrived at the hospital.
When they wheeled her away and shut the doors in my face, that’s when the grim reality of what was to come settled over me.
Too many times in the past had I prayed for her to be erased from my memories so the ache in my chest would stop.
And yet standing in that operating room doorway, watching them fight to keep her alive, I realized with brutal clarity that if she died…
there would be nothing left of me worth salvaging.
I’ve negotiated with Cartel leaders and stared down men who would happily slit my throat for a fraction of what I’m worth. None of that prepared me for nodding calmly while a surgeon explained the statistical probability of the woman I love not surviving through the night.
And then there had been Luca.
Trying to keep him calm while both of our worlds were collapsing felt like divine punishment.
Or perhaps karma at its finest. Kneeling in front of him, squeezing his small shoulders while telling him the doctors were helping Mama wake up and that she was just very tired and he needed to be brave, gutted me.
For a three-and-a-half-year-old, he is brilliant. He watches everything. Absorbs everything. He had looked at me with those grey-green eyes—my eyes—and asked, “She’s not going to leave me, right?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
All I could do was tell him no.
For the first time in years, I prayed I wasn’t lying.
When I get back to the room, I find Luca is sitting cross-legged on the foot of the narrow bed, picking at a tray of hospital food while Elena leans up against the raised headboard, one hand gently rubbing his back.
She’s trying to smile at whatever he’s saying, but the effort pulls at the corners of her mouth like it hurts.
I stop in the doorway, unnoticed for a moment.
They look… peaceful.
A mother and her child sharing a lukewarm plate of mashed potatoes and a plastic cup of apple juice.
Luca’s dark curls are mussed from sleep as Elena’s own hair falls in slight waves over the pillow behind her.
For anyone else, this would be ordinary—a family catching their breath after hell tried to swallow them whole.
For me, it’s anything but. It’s a fantasy that I know will soon end.
My gut twists so hard, I almost taste bile.
I know what’s behind her eyes when she glances up and sees me standing in the doorway. I know the exact question lingering in her mind that she won’t ask out loud. How long until the next one comes for us?
I put that fear there by not protecting her the way I should have.
Carlo, Enzo, the Bellantis, that had all been my blind spot.
I had put too much faith in myself, that I would be able to handle it all alone, and instead, all that bravado did was drag the last two people I ever wanted affected by this back into that world.
And now she’s looking at me like she’s already halfway out the door.
I cross the room and pull the chair closer to the side of the bed with the least amount of machines surrounding her. Luca glances over at me and offers a shy smile around a spoonful of potatoes.
“You want some?” he asks softly.
The sound lands like a fist to the sternum.
I force my mouth into something that might pass for a smile. “No. You eat up for me, okay? We need you big and strong to take care of Mama.”
He nods solemnly. “I will. I promise.”
Elena’s gaze flicks to me, then away again.
When the nurses come for the trays and the lights are dimmed for the night, Luca climbs into bed beside her despite the nurses’ protests about IV lines.
Elena winces but doesn’t push him away. Instead, she tucks his head under her chin and hums a quiet, wordless lullaby.
Within minutes his breathing evens out, his small fists slowly unclenching from where they’re wrapped around the front of her hospital gown.
I watch her watch him.
Her lashes are dark against pale cheeks as they slowly flutter closed too.
There’s a bruise blooming along her jaw from where she hit the marble when she went down before I got there, and another thin cut above her eyebrow has been stitched.
She looks fragile in a way that makes me want to burn the world down to keep anything else from touching her.
But above that, she still looks beautiful.
What scares me is the distance I can already feel growing between us. She hasn’t said it yet, but I heard it in her voice earlier when she told me she couldn’t go back to the villa.
I can’t raise Luca like that, Dante. I can’t live waiting for the next shoe to drop.
She’s right.
That’s the worst part.
And I have no idea how to convince her otherwise.
I stay until the night nurse comes in to check vitals. I carefully brush a strand of hair from her forehead back, freezing when her lashes flutter open and her eyes focus on me. They’re bleary, barely conscious as she tries to blink the sleep away from her eyes.
“Rest,” I murmur.
She nods once before closing her eyes and quickly falling asleep again.
I stay like that for a long time, watching the rise and fall of her chest, memorizing the faint freckles across her nose from the sun here and the way her lips part slightly when she finally relaxes.
I tell myself I can fix this.
Once she’s home, once she’s safe behind the walls of my villa and surrounded by my soldiers, she’ll see I can protect them both. After I hunt down the Bellanti Don and put a bullet between his eyes, there will be no more loose ends to worry about.
But a colder voice whispers a truth I don’t want to hear. That there is no amount of promising I can do that will change her mind. She started slipping away the night she fled the villa in the rain.
The moment she chose to run rather than trust me to protect them, that’s when her final decision had been made. She’s been slipping ever since. No amount of promised vengeance will pull her back if she’s already decided I’m part of the danger.
When the clock above the door reads past two, I finally stand. My legs feel leaden as I walk toward the door and slip out into the hallway again. I need water, or coffee, or… anything to keep me from pulling them both out of that bed and taking them back to the villa before either of them wakes up.
The vending machine hums at the far end of the hallway, rumbling softly when I feed coins into it. I watch the bottle drop and twist the cap off before downing the entire bottle of water in one go.
As soon as I finish it, a thought hits me with brutal clarity.
If she’s going to leave anyway, I want her to do it safely.
Elena has never been the kind of woman who obeys because she’s told to.
She’s proven it again and again when she ran from Sicily once, and she survived four years in New York fighting tooth and nail before my men took her from Brooklyn.
She’ll do what she thinks is best for Luca, even if it means walking away from me forever.
So, why not give her the tools to disappear properly this time?
The idea makes my stomach lurch.
I hate the thought of her vanishing again under new names to a new country to start a new life without me in it. I hate knowing I might never see Luca grow up or hear Elena say my name like she used to—half anger, half hunger, and all mine.
But if keeping her here means watching her fade into a shell of herself, forcing her to live in a cage she’ll never forgive me for building around her… then letting her go might be the only way I can still protect her.
I pull my phone from my pocket with a soft sigh. Notifications crowd the top bar with updates from Romano, security briefings from Bianchi, and Leo checking in, asking how Elena and Luca are holding up.
I swipe them away. None of them matter right now.
My thumb hovers over a contact I haven’t touched in over a year.
Nicolo Baresi.
For a long moment, I simply stare at the name.
The last time I called him, a senator who had been outed for working for me had vanished within forty-eight hours, shipped to another country, never to be seen or heard from again.
The time before that, one of my trusted contacts had used him to disappear his mistress out of the city before his wife came banging down his door looking for more alimony.