Chapter 3 STEPHANO #2
"We’ll be ready," the doctor says. "Triage will take you straight back."
Of course they will. They know my name. They know my family. And with everything we’ve poured into that place lately, we’ve practically paid for an expansion.
Dre’s staring. "Thunderstorm? As in: a storm is coming?"
He might be right. Maybe it wasn't our code, just a storm warning.
With the way things are right now, it does seem like the storm of the century is about to slam over New York.
It doesn't feel right, though. So I fill Dre in.
"It was Nico's and my cover," the words evoke images of Nico running toward me, laughing his ass off, shouting: Temporale, as he brushed by me before my enraged mother turned the corner.
"When we were kids, if one of us needed the other to take the heat from our parents, we’d say temporale.
It meant one of us would disappear while the other took the brunt, pretending to have no idea where the other was.
Nico and I were the only people who knew it. "
Dre’s eyes narrow. "Nico?"
"Yeah." Nico, the man everybody decided was a ghost. "So who the fuck is this woman?"
Dre's already moving, thumb flying over his iPad.
"Gimme ten seconds… I’m in. ER board: female, twenty-something, ballistic trauma, listed as," he looks up at me, "Ana Conti.
" He looks back down. "Two GSWs, just like the doc said.
" He whistles lowly, "and a lot of other cuts and bruises.
She either was in an accident, or someone did a number on her. "
There's only one way to find out. "Let’s go."
We leave the computer room. Two bodyguards fall in without a word; a third calls ahead for the car. My men know my looks. This one means blood.
I don’t register the sweat or the fact that I’m still in nothing but sweatpants until one of the guards, Gordon, tosses a shirt at my chest. I pull it on while stripping the last of the wraps from my hands, knuckles still humming. Sweat burns my eyes; I blink it away.
The front doors open. My Escalade is already idling and ready, driver alert, engine low. Gino flickers through my mind, still zip-tied in my office, still breathing. I won’t need him again. I usually handle my own messes, but today my plate is full.
"There’s something in my office that needs taking care of," I tell Gordon.
"On it, boss." No hesitation. Good.
I watch him disappear back inside, then climb into the SUV with Dre. The door shuts. The engine pulls us forward. War doesn’t announce itself. It just starts moving.
Dre tosses a compact at the driver; it looks like a black brick with a single switch. "Cyclops is live."
"Good." The little box will ride under the dash, talking to the city’s preemption grid like an ambulance would. Traffic lights see me coming and decide they’re green, and it also warns the driver of any cops lingering about looking for speeders.
The engine snarls. As the gate yawns and the night takes us, I hear my own pulse in the cabin. Not fast. Just… wrong. Who the fuck is this woman pretending to be my wife? Why is she beaten up and shot?
A light at the end of the block turns green before we’re close enough to see it. Then another. Then another. Nine blocks of silence while going ninety miles an hour with no sirens going in the distance. Dre finally cuts a look at me, dry as sandpaper. "Level with me, you ever been drunk in Vegas?"
"No."
"Drugged?"
"Not since I grew up."
He nods, then deadpans. "So we’re not dealing with a blackout chapel and a rhinestoned officiant named Earl."
"If Earl exists, I’ll kill him," I grunt out.
My mind has been going through the same scenarios.
But there is nothing. Fuck, I haven't even been on a date in years.
Not since… Nico vanished. I've been too busy tracking down my little brother.
People vanish every day, but not the son of a mafia capo.
Not unnoticed, not without a trace. None except him.
The next intersection turns green like we own the grid. Which we do.
Dre scrolls, thinking aloud. "The ER cameras caught a frantic Uber driver; he's still being questioned by the cops."
"Set Mallard on it." Mallard is one of our assets. A homicide detective. This might be out of his jurisdiction, but there are ways to get around that.
"Done." Dre nods. "Her face is too beat up and swollen to go through facial recognition."
Fuck, but I already figured as much when Dre told me that someone did a number on her. But that's the beauty about swelling, sooner or later it goes down, and then I'll know who this piccola tempesta—little storm—is.
"So all we know is that her name is Ana," Dre sighs.
He's rattled, maybe more than me; otherwise, he wouldn't have overlooked the fact that Ana could be an alias.
He groans, realizing the mistake he made. I wave him off, "It’s not the name that matters. It's the word she used: temporale."
"Could Nico have ever…?"
"No." I cut that off so fast it sounds like an explosion. "He wouldn’t put our word in circulation. If she knows it, it’s because he told her to tell me. Which means either he’s breathing, or someone is puppeteering a dead man."
I drag my palm down my face. Years of not knowing.
A sliver of hope, then anguish, then mourning, again, and again, and again.
Always searching. And lately—yeah—I’d let other fires take the front seat.
The Venezuelans. Edoardo. Raf. But I never stopped looking for Nico; I just wasn’t letting it eat me alive for a change.
Now his name has surfaced, and it’s the same blade as day one.
I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt. It does.
Exactly like the moment we realized he was gone.
Dre exhales through his nose, a humorless almost-laugh. "Outstanding. So tonight, we’re either picking up your unknown wife, your brother’s ghost, or a trap baited with family secrets."
"Uh-huh."
He tilts the iPad so I can see the ER diagram. "I’ll go in first and clear the route."
"If it’s a setup, they’ll expect that," I say. "If it’s not, I’m not sending you to tell a woman wearing my name that I didn’t show."
He shuts the tablet, sees something in my face, and realizes he’d better not poke. "Copy."
We rip past a line of red lights that all blink obediently to green. Every time they change, I hear the doctor again: Tell him temporale.
Left turn. Right. Then, finally, the red EMERGENCY sign at St. Raphael’s slices the dark open. Dre’s hand opens the door handle. "Last chance to admit you did a little ring-pop ceremony under a Ferris wheel somewhere."
I get out and step into the antiseptic glare. "I’m not married," I tell him, even as the doors whoosh open and bleach and beeping swallow us.
"Cool," he says, falling into step beside me, voice flat. "Then let’s go meet Mrs. Conti."
The elevator doors part on the ICU floor, and everything in me bristles a half-second before the chaos.
This whole floor reminds me of a glass-walled fishbowl, with white tile and pale blue light filtering in from the city below.
Nurses move in nervous shoals; machines chirp like they're arguing with each other.
My wife is somewhere down this hallway, fresh from surgery that, according to the doctor we briefly spoke to, went well.
Dre walks point, his jacket cut for movement but barely disguising the gun at his hip.
He makes a bad show of pretending to be here for anything other than violence.
He doesn't hide his glances to the left and right, scoping the exit strategies, the security cameras, and the best places to drop a body if it comes to that. Which leaves me to focus on the room numbers. At the nurse’s station desk sits a bottle-blonde.
She clocks us and immediately picks up the phone, but Dre’s on her before she can dial.
He leans in, drops my name and the room number, and she stiffens, recognizing who we are.
She buzzes us through the next set of locked doors.
About thirty feet down the corridor, two men in ill-fitting hospital greens step around another corner.
They look too out of place to be nurses or orderlies; they move like predators in a place built for the dying.
One of them is holding something behind his back.
I give Dre the nod, and we accelerate, two wolves in a petting zoo.
Both of us pull our guns, cock them in sync. We hit the turn just in time to see the men slip into a room to the left. Ana’s room. The sliding glass door is about to close when Dre stops it with his foot.
The two men are mid-action: one has a nurse by the hair, dragging her head back, the other is halfway across the room, bent over Ana’s bed.
The first man goes for the nurse’s throat with a scalpel.
I see the glint, hear the wet rattle as he opens her carotid.
The nurse collapses, clutching the wound, shocked, trying to stem the crimson spray.
The second man is faster; he’s got a blade of his own, descending toward Ana’s exposed neck, her face is barely visible under gauze, swelling, and the oxygen line snaking into her nose. Everything in my body turns into lightning.
Time telescopes. Distills to a single imperative: protect.
One word fills my head: KILL.
My gun is up, and my finger is already pulling the trigger. Two rounds hit the man’s heart first before he can finish turning from the bed to us. He folds like a marionette with its strings cut, the scalpel skittering across the linoleum. A spray of blood hits the pinkish sheets on Ana's bed.