CHAPTER THREE #2
Cassia turned her attention back to Dante. She pulled on a pair of black nitrile gloves and reached out to tear the ruined, blood-soaked fabric of his dress shirt away from the wound.
The moment her fingers brushed his skin, Dante’s hand shot out.
His grip locked around her wrist like a steel vise.
Despite the blood loss, his strength was staggering.
His pale green eyes burned into hers, hot with pain and a deep, instinctual resistance.
He was a man who yielded to no one, a man whose entire existence was predicated on control.
He didn't want a stranger touching him. He didn't want to be vulnerable.
Cassia looked at the large hand clamped around her wrist, and then she looked Dante directly in the eyes. She didn't struggle. She didn't panic.
"Listen to me," Cassia said, her tone brutally blunt and businesslike.
"I just worked a fourteen-hour shift pulling people out of the grave, and I am very tired.
If you want to live, let go of my wrist and let me help you.
If you want to die, let go of my wrist, walk out that door, and go do it on the street. I really do not care. Make a choice."
The silence in the living room was enough to crush bone.
Standing a few feet away, Zoran felt a sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh.
He found the entire exchange deeply amusing.
No one—no one—spoke to Don Dante Fazzari like that.
Men had been buried in the foundations of buildings for looking at Dante with half the disrespect this cold-eyed woman was currently leveling at him.
Dante stared up at her. He was thrown off balance.
The searing pain in his side was momentarily eclipsed by sheer unadulterated shock.
He searched her face, looking for the tremor of fear, the realization of who she was dealing with, but he found nothing.
He saw only a woman who was annoyed by his existence.
Who the hell is this woman? he thought, his mind struggling to categorize her.
Slowly, his fingers uncurled. He let go of her wrist.
"Good choice," Cassia murmured, already reaching for the local anesthetic.
For the next thirty minutes, the only sounds in the apartment were the tear of foil packaging, the snap of surgical scissors, and Dante’s ragged breathing.
Cassia worked with lethal precision. She cleaned the wound, digging out the debris from his ruined shirt.
When she administered the lidocaine, Dante flinched, his jaw locking so tight Cassia thought his teeth might shatter, but he didn't make a sound.
She stitched the torn muscle and skin with the fluid, economical movements of a master at her craft, finally packing the wound tightly and wrapping his torso in clean white bandages.
When it was done, she stripped off her bloody gloves, threw them into a biohazard bag she kept in her kit, and stood up.
"Don't move," she told Dante, not looking at him as she walked toward the small, open-plan kitchen.
Cassia washed her hands at the sink, the water running pink, then turned on the electric kettle. She pulled two ceramic mugs from the cupboard and dropped a chamomile tea bag into each. When the water boiled, she poured it, letting it steep before carrying the mugs back into the living room.
She handed one to Zoran, who accepted it with a bewildered nod, and placed the other on the coffee table near Dante.
Zoran looked at the woman and asked, "Can he be moved tonight?"
Cassia looked at Dante, who was pale but stable, staring silently at the ceiling. "No. I don’t want him moved tonight. The motion could restart the bleeding or tear the repair. After that, he needs to be relocated regardless. I don't want this in my life."
"That is fine," Zoran agreed, his tone carrying a sudden, begrudging respect. "We'll stay here. We won't be a problem for you, doctor."
"See that you aren't," Cassia replied smoothly.
She turned back to her medical bag and retrieved a small amber pill bottle. She shook out two white tablets into her palm and held them out toward Dante.
"Take these," she ordered.
Dante slowly turned his head to look at her. The carved lines of his face were tight with pain. "No."
Cassia closed her eyes for a brief second, praying for patience. "They are sedatives. Accompanied by a painkiller."
"I said no," Dante gritted out, his voice a low, stubborn rasp. He refused to be sedated in a stranger's home, surrounded by unknown variables. His paranoia was the only thing that had kept him alive this long.
Cassia dropped her hand, rolling her eyes.
"Listen. If you want to suffer through the night in agonizing pain because of some misguided macho complex, that is your choice.
But it would help everyone in this room, and it would certainly help me sleep peacefully, if you would just take the damn pills.
It is the least you can do considering I just spent forty minutes fixing your stupid wound. "
Dante stared at her, caught somewhere between a flare of irritation and an intense, burning curiosity. The sheer audacity of her tone was mesmerizing. She was immune to the gravity he projected.
"Is this your idea of a doctor's bedside manner?" Dante asked, his voice laced with dark, sardonic amusement.
Cassia gave him a withering glare that could have frozen a lesser man in his tracks.
"Not all my patients get this treatment," Cassia retorted, her voice dripping with cool dismissal as she placed the pills on the table beside his mug of tea. "If the patient is nice to me, I'm nice right back."
The implication hung heavily in the air between them: You have not earned my kindness.
Cassia didn't wait for a response. She turned on her heel and walked down the short hallway toward her bedroom. "The extra blankets are in the hall closet. Don't bleed on my couch any more than you already have. Goodnight."
Her bedroom door clicked shut, the lock sliding securely into place.
In the living room, Zoran looked from the closed door to his boss. A slow, very rare smirk pulled at the corner of Zoran's mouth.
Dante Fazzari looked at the two white pills on the table, then up at the locked bedroom door. For the first time in eight years, the dead, calcified void in his chest felt the strangest, most unfamiliar sensation.
He was intrigued.