26. Lydia
LYDIA
The lobby smells like bleach and burnt coffee, and the fluorescent lights buzz so loud I can hear them over my own pulse.
We didn't stop moving from the tarmac. Nico's hand found the small of my back the second we cleared the jet's stairs and it hasn't left since, not through customs, not through the car, not through the sliding doors that dumped us into this washed-out lobby at four in the morning.
The woman at the front desk barely looks up. Types Bianca's name into her computer like she's ringing up groceries. Tells us intensive care, third floor, and to check in with the nurses' station.
I already know we're not walking in unescorted. Two of Nico's men are posted by the elevator bank, still as church statues, jackets too clean for a hospital at this hour. Another one down the hall we're headed toward. Anastasio worked fast for a guy who was still in Sicily when the call came in.
"They're just here," Nico says, low, reading my face before I ask. "Nobody touches you."
I nod because I don't trust my voice yet.
The elevator ride is silent. I watch the numbers climb and think about the last time I stood in a hospital, seventeen years old, lying to a triage nurse about how I got the bruise on my jaw.
I think about how I promised myself, walking out that door for good three days later, that I'd come back for my mother.
Seven years. I didn't come back. Not until I had no choice.
The nurse who meets us outside the ICU doors has kind eyes and a voice trained not to give anything away.
"She's stable, for now," she says. It's a technical word. It buys time, that's all. "Unconscious. We're monitoring for organ stress. It's too early to say how this settles out."
"Can I see her?"
"Two visitors at a time. Family only past this point." She says it automatically, a rule recited a thousand times, no idea what those two words are about to cost me.
Nico's hand tightens once against my back. I step through the doors before I can think better of it.
Nothing prepares me for the room.
The lines. The machines breathing numbers at each other in soft beeps. My mother, tiny under a white blanket, tubes taped to the back of her hand, an oxygen line looped under her nose.
And then the gown slips at her shoulder when a monitor cord shifts, and I see it.
Bruising. Green-yellow at the edges, fresh purple closer in, layered over each other like something that's been happening for weeks, not once. Not from a fall. Not from whatever pills put her here tonight.
I've heard this through a door my whole childhood. The thud of it, the silence after. I never had to look at it laid out on skin before.
My knees actually buckle, just slightly, and Nico's hand is there at my elbow before I even sway.
I don't cry. I want to. I just stand there with my throat locked shut, staring at my mother's arm like if I look hard enough I can rewind time and put myself back in this house seven years ago, the version of me who could've stopped this instead of running.
I promised her I'd come back for her.
I didn't.
That's the whole rot of it, right there, and no plane ticket or dead father-in-law or forced marriage changes the fact that I left her here with him for seven years while I built a life two states away with a fake name.
I used to tell myself she could've left too.
That she chose to stay, chose him, chose this.
Standing here now, looking at what choosing him actually costs a body, I can't hold onto that lie anymore.
She didn't choose anything. She survived what was in front of her, same as I did.
I got out and she didn't. That difference is the only thing that separates us.
"Bianca."
Frank's voice, from the chair at her bedside, and I'd forgotten he was even in the room until he speaks.
He's up and moving before I can react, planting a kiss on her forehead so tender a stranger would weep for him. He takes her hand like he's afraid of breaking it. When the nurse steps back in to check the monitor, he turns his whole face toward her, eyes wet, chin trembling.
"Is she in pain? Tell me she's not in pain." His voice cracks right on cue. "God, if I could trade places with her..."
The nurse's expression softens. Of course it does. He's good. Practiced smooth, like he's done this exact performance in this exact key before, for cops, for doctors, for judges.
He doesn't look at me once while she's in the room.
The second the door swings shut behind her, it's like a switch flips.
He drops Bianca's hand. Doesn't look back at her. Turns to me instead, and every ounce of grief drains out of his face like it was never there.
"Lyddie." He says my name the old way, the way that used to make my skin crawl at the dinner table. It still does. "You made it. Must've cost your husband a fortune, flying you home on no notice like that."
"Get away from her."
"Excuse me?" He steps closer to the bed instead, plants himself squarely between me and Bianca like he's guarding her, like he's protecting her from me.
"I'm her husband. I'm her next of kin. You're..." He tilts his head, sizing me up like a stray dog that wandered too close, deciding whether I'm worth the trouble of chasing off.
"What are you, exactly, these days? Visitor's badge is about the size of it. "
"She's my mother."
"She's my wife." He says it flat, final, badge-tone. "Captain Frank Carpenter, OCCB. That means something in this building, sweetheart, in case you forgot. I could have a nurse walking you out to the lobby inside thirty seconds if I felt like it."
Nico goes still beside me. Not calm-still. Coiled-still.
Frank's gaze flicks to him and something ugly lights up behind his eyes, delighted, like he's been waiting all night for exactly this audience.
"Your mother still got that chip in her, Lyddie?" He says it soft, conversational, easy as small talk. "The one we talked about. I told you once, didn't I, I always know where my girls are."
My stomach turns over. I don't answer him. I won't give him that.
"Careful," he goes on, casual as anything, "how much heat you bring down on your new husband here. OCCB's got a whole file open on him already. Be a shame if his loving wife's little family drama gave us cause to look even closer."
"You son of a bitch."
"Language." He smiles. "In front of your mother, no less."
That's when I feel it. Nico, beside me, going from coiled to something past coiled. His hand slides out from my back. I hear the breath he takes, slow and even, and I know exactly what it means: he's about to do something there's no coming back from.
"Say one more thing to her," Nico says, his voice dropping flat and quiet, the same stillness I heard the night he told me what he was going to do to Frank, "and I put you in the bed next to hers."
Frank laughs. Actual laughter, delighted, badge gleaming under the fluorescents as he squares his shoulders.
"That a threat, Mr. D'Ambrosio? In a hospital?
In front of witnesses? You've got half of Organized Crime Control already building a case against you and you want to hand me the rest of it gift-wrapped? "
"I don't care about your case."
"Nico."
He doesn't hear me. His whole body has gone somewhere past reasoning, past the version of him that calculates risk before he moves. I've watched him hold this exact fury down before, at a dozen smaller moments since the day he became Don. I've never had to be the one holding the door shut on it.
Until now.
I grab his hand.
I lace my fingers through his, hard enough to hurt, holding on with everything I've got. "Don't," I say, quiet, just for him. "Don't give him this. Not here. Not like this."
His face goes rigid. Something raw flickers behind the fury, gone almost before I catch it.
"Lydia." Just my name, rough, a warning and a plea in the same breath.
"I know." My thumb presses into his knuckles. "I know what he did to her. I know what you want to do right now. I want it too. But not in this room, with her lying right there, with a badge on his chest and cops in the building. Please."
Nothing moves for a long moment. His jaw works. The hand in mine is shaking, just slightly, with the effort of not moving.
Then, slow, some of it drains out of him. Not all of it. Just enough.
Frank watches the whole thing happen with open, gleeful amusement, head tilted like he's watching a dog get walked back onto its leash.
"Look at that," he says. "Little wife's got him trained already. Didn't take long, did it? Must be all that practice keeping men in line growing up in my house."
I want to put my fist through his teeth.
"You're smarter than you look, Lyddie," he goes on, dropping his voice, almost gentle now, which is worse than the cruelty.
"Smart enough to know there's a version of this where it all gets fixed.
Where your mother gets better care than this city hospital's giving her.
Where certain files stop getting looked at so hard.
All it takes is you being reasonable with me. Like old times."
My skin crawls so hard I feel it in my teeth.
"I want to talk to you," Frank says. "Alone."
"No." Nico's answer comes before Frank even finishes the sentence.
"Family only, Mr. D'Ambrosio." Frank says it almost kindly, savoring every syllable of it, and looks straight at me while he says it, like he already knows exactly which word is going to work.
Nico's hand tightens around mine like he's going to plant his feet and refuse for both of us.
"I've got this," I tell him, and I'm not sure which of us I'm trying to convince.
"Lydia, no. You are not walking anywhere with him alone."
"He's not going to do anything to me in a hospital hallway with your men standing twenty feet away.
" I make myself say it steady, even though I don't fully believe it, even though some seventeen-year-old part of me is screaming to run the other direction and never look back.
"I need to hear what he wants. You know I do. "
He looks at me for a long moment, jaw tight, amber eyes burning with everything he isn't allowed to do right now.
Then his gaze drops to my hand still locked around his, and something in his jaw eases, just barely.
He understands what it cost me to be the one holding him back instead of the other way around.
"I'll be right here," he says finally, quiet, rough. “But if I hear even the lightest hint that you’re in trouble, nothing in this world is stopping me from coming to you.”
"I know."
I give his hand one last squeeze and let it go slower than I want to.
Frank's already at the door, holding it open for me with the same practiced courtesy he used on the nurse ten minutes ago, like he's a gentleman, like this is nothing.
I walk toward him anyway.
Behind me, I hear Nico exhale, long and controlled, a man standing perfectly still because I asked him to and for no other reason on earth.
The door swings shut between us. It's just me and Frank in the hallway, my mother lying unconscious on the other side of a wall, and seven years of running collapsing down into this one short walk I can't take back.
Frank falls into step beside me, unhurried, hands in his pockets, like we're two people who happen to be heading the same direction and nothing more. Like there isn't a man on the other side of that door holding himself in place by sheer will because I asked him to.
"See," he says, low, almost fond. "This is all it takes. You just gotta be willing to listen."
I don't answer him. I keep walking, counting the tiles under my feet, and somewhere behind my ribs a voice that sounds exactly like the girl I was at seventeen is screaming at me to turn around and run.
I don't run.
I never got to, not really. Not when it mattered.
So I walk.