Chapter Twenty
Venezio
I woke up with a start, feeling disoriented and slow.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I wasn’t even in bed alone. Even though Steph had half-climbed on top of me in her sleep.
It came back in flashes, then all at once.
The fancy ballroom.
The sex in the bathroom.
The familiar face.
Adrenaline.
Fear.
Then abject terror when I couldn’t protect Steph.
Finding her, damn near losing her to the cold, then a night by her side.
I wasn’t a stranger to exercise, to moving my body. But every damn muscle felt heavy and weak as I became aware of them again.
If I was feeling so shitty, Stephanie was going to be truly miserable when she woke up.
I reached for the hand on my chest, gently turning it palm up, glad to find the nasty scrapes had started to close up already. They still looked angry but she would probably be able to wash her hands and hold a utensil without pain.
I didn’t have those kinds of hopes for her feet.
I’d never seen blisters like that before, ones that took up damn near half of her soles, so full of fluid that I wasn’t sure how she could possibly put any weight on them.
All I could hope for on that front was that a few hours off of them would allow her body to circulate the fluid back away from her feet.
Not wanting to wake her up, I turned to glance out the window, my brows furrowing at the nearly dark sky.
The fuck?
I reached toward the nightstand before remembering my damn phone was dead.
But it couldn’t be getting dark.
That would mean we’d slept, what, twelve hours?
Not impossible, but I wasn’t sure I slept that much in a week, let alone one night.
Maybe that was why it was possible, though. A lifetime of sleep debt had finally caught up with me on the one night where I not only didn’t need to get up, but didn’t want to. Not with Stephanie curled up beside me.
As for Steph, well, nearly dying was pretty fucking exhausting for someone who’d never experienced it before. And I was sure the mild hypothermia had wreaked havoc on her body. Every system needed a reboot to recover.
So, yeah, it was possible.
The longer I lay there, the more likely it seemed as my stomach twisted in hunger and my bladder felt like it was gonna fucking burst.
“No,” Steph grumbled as I tried to slide out from underneath her while my sluggish mind started to put things together.
Like how my phone had been dead for more than half a day after frantically calling half of the fucking Costa Family. How they were surely all trying to track me down now.
I had to get up, head out, grab a charging cord, and call them back.
“Gotta go to the bathroom,” I told her.
My lips curved up as she let out another grumble and slipped into my spot as I got off the bed.
When I passed back through the room, she was still trying to cling to sleep. There was no good reason not to let her, especially knowing she was going to be in all sorts of pain when she woke up.
I went to the kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee.
A glance at the clock said I was right. It was nearing sundown. I’d slept a whole damn day away.
The food options were limited to shit that could last years, so I made us each a bowl of beef stew and piled that, the coffee, and some more water onto a tray to carry back into the bedroom.
Steph was sitting up in bed, the blankets pooled around her waist, her hair bed-messy, and a confused line between her brows.
“It’s dark.”
“We slept for twelve hours.”
“Huh,” she said, still a little foggy from sleep.
“I brought food and coffee.”
“Okay,” she said, sliding to the side of the bed and making her way into the bathroom.
“Bring some of the ibuprofen out with you,” I called when the door opened again.
“Great minds,” she said, shaking the bottle as she tiptoed toward the bed.
“How can you hurt everywhere all at once?”
I took the bottle from her hands, opened it, removed the seal, then shook two out into her palm before taking my own.
“Dunno. But this should help a little.”
“Is it infused with magic?” she asked, taking her coffee. “I can’t believe I slept twelve hours. I think the only time I slept twelve hours was when I had a really wicked flu one year. My mom said she was worried I was dying with how much I was sleeping.”
“Think last night was just as taxing on your body as the flu,” I said, passing a bowl toward her when she set her mug back down. “So you need to eat.”
“I need to call Andy and Sammy. They’re probably worried about me. And… God, what if they let themselves into my apartment and see the mess? I need to… wait. Where’s my phone?”
“I don’t know, babe. I don’t think you had it when you were on your knees in the snow. Maybe it fell from your hands when you were running. Your fingers were icy. You might not have even noticed.”
“I guess. But now we have no phone at all.”
“After we eat, I will go and grab a cord. Once I make my calls, if you want to call Andy from it, you can.”
That seemed to calm her down enough to focus on eating, drinking, and caffeinating.
I wasn’t sure if it was the pills, the fluids, or the food, but I was feeling a lot more alive about half an hour later.
“How you feeling?” I asked, taking the empty bowl from her.
“If you can believe this, a little tired,” she admitted with a confused head shake.
“I can believe it. Go back to sleep. Your body wants it, so you need it.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. “What happens now? After you call your… coworkers?”
“Shit gets a fuckuva lot easier.”
Incredibly, though, I suddenly wanted to drag my feet in getting that charging cord.
We were safe.
We were recovering.
We were together.
Suddenly, that shit felt more important than talking to my family, resolving the issue, and getting back to our lives.
“Is your boss going to be mad at you?”
“Probably not. Lorenzo doesn’t get mad often. Been a boss for too long. Seen and done it all. He’s gonna have questions, but that’s about it.”
“Is he going to be… mad about me?”
“About you?”
“That I’m, you know, involved now?”
“Hate to break it to you, babe, but you’ve been involved from the jump. You just didn’t know it.”
“Yeah, but now I know who you are. And what you were doing…”
“So did the old director.”
“But he was… on the take. Is that the right wording?”
“Yeah, babe, that’s the right wording,” I said, smiling at her. “Look, if you’re worried something is gonna happen to you, the Costas don’t hurt women. Even if they did, I wouldn’t let them.”
“You can’t choose anyone else over Family,” she said.
“I can do whatever the fuck I want. I’m not a capo. I didn’t make the same vows Made men like that make.”
“Do you like being in this line of work?”
“I’m good at it. It gives me the kind of money I could only dream about as a kid. That shit is important to me.”
“I get that. Once you’ve gone without, you never want to again.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
We had different upbringings, different parents, but we both had similar trauma, similar scars.
“Does it bother you?” I asked, not sure why I was doing so.
“I mean, it bothers me that you lied to me. I don’t really know what I think about everything else.”
That was fair.
It was all new to her.
And since knowing, she’d been terrified, in pain, and recovering. It didn’t leave much time to think about shit.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever been to prison?”
“Prison? No. Jail… a few times when I was younger. Before I got smart. The Costa guys, they’re smart too. Multi-generational gangsters. There are layers upon layers of protection. No one goes to prison anymore.”
“I knew someone who said that the mob doesn’t really exist anymore. Since RICO.”
“Yeah, well, we’re okay with everyone thinking that. Keeps eyes off of us.”
“That makes sense.”
She leaned over, just shy of letting her head rest on my chest. I went ahead and made it easier for her, wrapping an arm around her, then curling her into me.
“Feeling any better?”
“The throbbing has become a dull ache. But I feel no motivation to get off of this bed.”
“Me either,” I agreed.
“Would you be in any more trouble by waiting a couple of hours before calling in?”
“Doubt it.”
“Then maybe we can just stay here for a bit. I can force you to watch a Christmas movie,” she said, waving to the TV set on the dresser across from the bed that we had yet to turn on.
“Sounds good to me,” I said, finding the remote and passing it to her.
And the crazy thing was, it did.