Chapter 27 Massimo
MASSIMO
“Sir, you can’t just leave, you’ve been hurt,” the nurse said for the tenth time as she hovered at my side.
I fought the urge to bite her head off and relaxed back onto the bed. Fucking hell.
“How long will it take?” I asked instead.
“Not long. The doctor has been really busy seeing to those injured in the fire.”
“And the little girl I came in with?” I asked.
They’d split up me and Tatiana when the ambulance had arrived at the hospital. A fucking beam had fallen on me just as I’d reached the door of the burning building last night and knocked me out for hours. An entire night. Hours I couldn’t afford to lose.
“She’s being treated for smoke inhalation. She’s doing just fine.” The nurse gave me an encouraging smile and reached for the iodine-soaked gauze she was using to clean my burns.
They were superficial at best. Some on my hands and arms. The very minimum you could expect if you went into a building where burning beams fell from the sky.
I’d found Tatiana hiding in a cupboard in the kitchen.
I’d come damn near to not finding her at all. A thought that didn’t bear thinking about. She’d run out of her room and hidden before the nurses went to check on her.
She’d already been unconscious from the smoke in the air when I’d found her.
Those burning moments, carrying her out of the building, shoving and pushing the fallen beams away from us, had taken me back in time to my years in the military.
Then the ceiling had fallen, and it had been lights out.
There was another patient from the institute in the bed next to me, and he’d told me that Katarina had gotten into a car. Blackwood’s car.
My blood burned at the thought of her being with him. Where the hell had he taken her? I didn’t have my personal effects. The damn nurses had taken all of them from me when I’d come into the hospital with Tatiana, and they’d insisted on treating the burns on my hands and arms.
Now I sat in a paper gown without my phone or the ability to call Giada or check my tracking app.
Thank fuck I’d given Katarina the dog tags.
The tracker inside was linked to an app on my phone.
I could sign into the program from somewhere else, but the fastest thing would be to get my own phone back.
I had exactly one thing in my possession that I was sentimental about, and that was those tags, hence the tracker.
I could only be grateful I had a way to find Katarina quickly, once I got out of here.
The nurse finally finished cleaning the burns.
I watched men in cop uniforms passing up and down the hallway.
The detectives were back, the ones who’d left just before the fire, and a hell of a lot more officers.
I supposed that the case was turning into something a lot more involved.
A disappearance, a suicide, and now a fire.
Suspicious. I needed to get out of here before they decided to question me, too. I had to find Katarina.
What felt like an hour later saw the nurse sticking fresh bandages over my wounds and stepping back.
“Are we done? I need my stuff back—my clothes and my phone.”
She nodded, and her eyes darted to the curtain guiltily.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Lucciano, or should I say Father? I have them here,” a male voice said from the gap in the curtain.
I held the nurse’s eye for a long moment. She’d been stalling me. Perfect.
Standing in that gap was the same detective who had been at Hallow Hall before, holding my priest’s robes and phone.
“I would love to have a chat, too, while we’re here,” he said with a smile.
Fuck me.
“So, tell me again why you were at Hallow Hall? Since you aren’t actually affiliated with the Church?” Detective Margoni was a persistent fucker, I’d give him that.
I shrugged. “Hallow Hall Institute has no affiliation with the Church either, just a lot of old men who liked to cosplay as priests. I was following their dress code.”
Margoni frowned at me, and my fraying patience snapped.
“Listen, Detective, I appreciate your zeal, it’s very impressive, but you need to look where the real problems are, like why has a place like this been running for as long as it has right here in Torino? Why hasn’t it been investigated before?”
“It’s registered as a private hospital,” Margoni pointed out.
“A private hospital that doesn’t appear to make any money and people barely pay any fees to attend? Yeah, that sounds aboveboard.”
Margoni sighed. “Do you know how stretched thin we are in the city? If there are no complaints about a place, then why would we go and poke into it?”
“Don’t ask me to explain your ineptitude. Now, if you’re finished asking me to do your job for you, I need to get going.”
Margoni shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you charging me with something?”
“For years there was nothing going on at Hallow Hall, and then you arrive, and the men in charge are either missing or dead.”
“As far as I’m aware, one tragically took his own life, maybe because of the fucked-up shit they’d been doing up there, and that spooked the other two.
They ran away, scared of answering for their crimes.
” I slipped my hands behind my head and stretched my back.
The interrogation room at the small station that Margoni had brought me to wasn’t the most comfortable place.
“That’s a bit too convenient for me,” Margoni said.
“Sure, now you hate convenience, but turning the other way for decades was fine,” I muttered, and tutted at him. “Shame on you, Detective.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Whether you have anything to do with the death and disappearances and fire or not, you were still there pretending to be a man of the cloth to fool the patients. We don’t take that lightly here.”
“So charge me with something,” I dared him. I needed to get the fuck out of here, and the sooner they let me out of this room or moved me somewhere, the sooner I could escape.
“I don’t have to charge you with anything until you’ve been held for twenty-four hours.” He pushed back from the chair and stood. “So I’ll see you at the end of that time. Let me know if you want to talk.”
“Margoni! What about a phone call?” I shouted after him as he walked out. Anger and frustration welled up inside me. I had to leave and find Katarina now. Every minute that passed was another that she was with Blackwood. Why had she gone with him? What had he done to make her?
Dark fury like I’d never known filled me as I sat and simmered in it.
I’d find my little stray and kill everyone who had touched her.
I’d kill everyone who had ever scared her or made her cry.
I’d kill everyone who had looked at her wrong.
I’d kill every single person involved in Hallow Hall Institute. They were already dead.
The thought that they might have already hurt her played on the edge of my mind, but I couldn’t face it right now.
Compartmentalizing was how I’d survived as long as I had.
Everything went into a box, only to be thought about when it was relevant.
It was how I’d coped with all the things I’d seen and done.
One box for what I’d found in a school in a war-torn land.
Another for a fellow soldier dying in my arms, his legs blown off by a land mine, clutching a picture of his pregnant wife.
Another for the last moments of all the marks I’d killed on contracts.
Another for the terrible fear brewing inside me at the thought that I’d already failed to protect the one person I cared about.
Nope. That went into a box with the lid jammed on top. That particular worry would only waste my time when I had none to spare.
First, I’d find Katarina and make her safe and protected forever . . .
Then, they’d all pay.
Every single one.