Chapter 1
Isabella
“I’ve got one patient left, and then I can go home,” my coworker, Tami, said with a stretch. We were standing together at the nursing station, each with a patient folder in our hands. My last patient had already checked out, and I had maybe ten minutes before I was supposed to clock out.
I could say nothing, but I knew Tami was meant to be off more than half an hour ago. I reached over and took the folder from her hands. “I got this one.”
“You don’t have to.”
I was already waving her away. “Go,” I said. “I’m sure John is waiting for you at home.”
Tami smiled, tired but grateful. “Thank you! I owe you one.”
One more won’t hurt, I told myself as Tami skipped toward our breakroom. I looked down at the chart in my hands and sighed. John Smith, room two. Average name, hopefully average issue, and then I could head home myself. I had a frozen pizza and an episode of Great British Bake Off calling my name.
“Sorry for the long wait, Mr. Smith,” I said as I pushed open the door of the exam room. My eyes landed on the tall man leaning against the exam table, and I almost swallowed my tongue. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don’t let him catch me drooling.
When the man glanced my way, his eyes went wide.
“Fucking hell,” he wheezed, as if he had just been sucker punched in the gut.
He straightened up; he was even taller and broader than I originally thought.
His eyes, light and piercing, all but burned into me, like he was trying to see directly into my soul.
“Mr. Smith?” I asked.
That seemed to jolt him back to himself, and he broke our staring contest. I watched his jaw, nearly hidden beneath a well-maintained beard, clench, like he was grinding his teeth. “That’s me,” he said, voice like gravel.
I nodded. “Uh-huh.” A few seconds later it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually started the initial work-up. “Oh, uhm, sorry about that,” I said and ignored the heat in my cheeks. I looked down at the chart. There wasn’t a complaint written on the form. “What brings you in today?”
“An accident,” he said. He sounded totally calm, but something about the way he said it sent a shiver down my spine. An accident? There was no urgency, no concern. Just a statement.
“What kind of accident?” I asked, looking him over and seeing nothing immediately wrong.
He didn’t answer my question right away; instead, his eyes dragged over my face, my body. He was looking at me like he’d seen me before, but I would have remembered a man like him. “The kind you don’t call 911 for,” he finally said.
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or evasive, but something about him put me on edge. “So, you injured yourself?” I asked. My patience was wearing thin.
His eyes flicked to mine, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Why else would I be here?”
My jaw tightened. He was playing with me, and I didn’t like it. “Mr. Smith, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I can’t help you,” I said, keeping my voice steady despite the irritation churning beneath the surface.
“Help me?” he echoed, almost amused. “I wasn’t aware that you were my doctor, Ms.—?”
“Rossi,” I said, forcing myself to stay professional. “Isabella. You’re right, sir, I’m not your doctor. I’m the nursing assistant, which means I do the intake paperwork and prep you for the doctor.” I held up his chart and tapped it lightly with my pen. “So, what happened?”
There was a long pause; his eyes were on me longer than necessary, as if weighing whether to answer. Then, finally, he said, “I cut myself.”
My grip tightened around the pen, pulse skyrocketing. “Where did you cut yourself?” I asked, keeping my voice controlled. There’s no reason to be scared, I reminded myself. He hasn’t done anything to you. “Are you still bleeding? How long ago did this happen?”
His gaze lingered on me, unreadable, before he pulled his shirt over his head.
All I saw, at first, was the kind of chest I wanted to put my mouth on, and then I saw a bandage on his pectoral muscle.
He grabbed the edge of the tape and pulled it off: the cut was clean, controlled.
Not the kind of wound from some random accident.
My stomach twisted in on itself. The rest of his torso was covered in scars, some older and some still pink and new. This was a dangerous man. Cosa Nostra, probably, from the looks of him. And he’d come into the urgi-care for a cut that looked like he’d done it himself.
I swallowed hard. “That doesn’t look too serious,” I said, but my voice sounded hollow in my own ears. Something wasn’t right here.
He smirked, like a shark smelling blood in the water. “No,” he said softly. “It’s not. Not yet.”
My teeth ground together, trying to keep the smile on my face. “Well, you might need stitches,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and set up the suture tray, and then I’ll grab the nurse practitioner for you.”
“You can’t do it?” he asked.
I had before, even though I wasn’t necessarily supposed to…
but we were often short-staffed, and busy people didn’t always want to wait.
Today, though, I shook my head. I wanted out of this room now.
“Sorry, I’m a CNA. I’m not licensed to do sutures.
” I opened the cabinet over the counter and reached for a suture kit. “Can you tell me how you got that cut?”
“I told you it was an accident.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we’ll need to clean the wound before we close it, and it would be good to know if you had cut yourself with something rusty or anything like that.”
The man, who I was sure wasn’t actually named “John Smith,” scoffed. “It happened in the kitchen. The blade wasn’t rusty.”
I hummed as I pulled down the suture kit and put it on the tray.
Keeping my back to him, I opened the kit and laid everything out like I normally would, but I slipped the scalpel up my shirt sleeve.
“Well, I think I’ve got everything that I need,” I said.
“I’ll just pop out and grab someone who can get that closed up for you. ”
I kept my shoulders straight and tried to look casual as I moved toward the door. “Isabella.”
Keep going. Don’t look back. “I’ll be right back, Mr. Smith. No worries.”
A firm hand closed around my arm before I could open the door, and I was wrenched around.
Fuck, he was big. He had put his shirt back on, and the way it clung to his arms and chest that I’d found so attractive before emphasized just how much bigger he was than me now. My breath shuttered in my lungs.
“I think we can stop playing this game, don’t you, Ms. Rossi?” he asked. I wanted to scream. I tried to. But the sound got caught in my chest. “We’re going to walk out of here together, understand? And you’re not going to scream, or I’ll be forced to make sure that you can’t scream.”
His voice was coaxing, almost soothing, and that was what snapped me out of my fear-driven paralysis. “Fuck you,” I spat at him and let the scalpel slide out of my sleeve into my hand.
I swung my arm out with a scream, and he swore out loud when the scalpel sliced through his forearm. I went for the door and pushed hard, screaming my head off, expecting security to come running…but there was nothing. Everything was eerily quiet; the nursing station was empty.
I looked down the long hallway, and I could see the shadow of a man by the exit. There wasn’t time to debate what to do. I had to run. Now. I took off toward the back exit, thinking that I could shove the man with the door and try to slip around him.
Before I could even reach the exit, a hulk of a man stepped out of an exam room and grabbed me.
I struggled in his grip and kept screaming.
“I told you to keep your mouth shut,” a deep, angry voice said from behind me.
The man who held me closed a hand around my throat and squeezed.
Black spots jumped in front of my eyes. I couldn’t inhale.
Just as I was losing grip on my consciousness, he let go of my throat, and I sucked in a lungful of air.
He handed me off to my “patient,” who was obviously the leader.
The man wrapped a hand around both of my wrists, holding so tightly that I could feel the bones rubbing together.
“Try anything like that again, and I’ll let Elio break your fucking neck. ”
Tears welled up in my eyes now; there was no holding them back.
I gave a little nod, and he forced me forward.
The back exit opened as we approached: a blacked-out SUV was waiting with the rear door open.
With a rough grip, he shoved me in and closed the door behind me.
“Put something over her mouth,” he barked to whoever was waiting.
“Her screams have given me a headache.” Rough hands lashed my wrists together, and then fabric was unceremoniously shoved into my mouth and tied around my head.
The man, meanwhile, had come around the vehicle and settled in the passenger seat. “Where to, Enzo?”
“The Palazzo.”
Enzo? The Palazzo? Fear gripped me all the tighter. The Palazzo was a boutique hotel in Manhattan that was a front for the Vitali crime family. This man couldn’t be Lorenzo Vitali. Right? There was no way the Don of the biggest family of the Cosa Nostra came on a snatch-and-grab.
Tears slipped down my cheeks, but I did my best not to make a sound. I’m going to die, I thought, but I would be damned if I went out sniveling like a child.