CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Being part of the mob meant living with an ever-present, humming undercurrent of unpredictability.
It was a life built on a foundation of shifting loyalties, sudden violence, and the very real, statistical probability that things would not always go the way anyone wanted.
Danger was not an anomaly; it was the baseline operating temperature.
In that sense, nothing about this particular day was especially unusual or specific for Dante Fazzari or the men who fought for him.
People got hurt. That was the math of the underworld.
For Dr. Cassia Thorn, however, today had been a normal, blessedly mundane day.
She was standing in the cramped, fluorescent-lit locker room of Central Hospital, shivering slightly in the over-air-conditioned space as she stripped off her dark blue scrubs and pulled on her oversized university t-shirt and grey sweatpants.
She had just finished a grueling twelve-hour shift, successfully navigating two localized traumas and a ruptured appendix.
She was exhausted, her bones aching with a deep, familiar weariness, and her mind was already locked onto the prospect of a hot shower and her own bed.
She had just slung her canvas tote over her shoulder when her cell phone vibrated violently against the metal bottom of her locker.
Cassia pulled it out, frowning at the encrypted caller ID. It wasn't Dante. It was Zoran.
"What is it, Zoran?" Cassia answered, skipping the pleasantries as she pushed open the locker room door and stepped out into the hallway.
"Doctor," Zoran’s voice came through the speaker. It lacked its usual booming, amused warmth. It was tight, clipped, and strictly professional. "I apologize for interrupting your evening. But Dante has been hurt. And taking him to a civilian hospital is not an option tonight."
Cassia stopped walking.
She stood frozen in the middle of the linoleum corridor, the ambient noise of the hospital fading into static.
Her first reaction was fear. It was a cold, visceral spike of terror that pierced directly through her sternum and wrapped its icy fingers around her lungs.
It struck her as incredibly strange, almost unsettling.
Cassia was a trauma surgeon. She dealt with catastrophic injuries every single day, and she did so with a heart rate that rarely breached eighty beats a minute.
Furthermore, she knew what kind of man Dante Fazzari was.
He was a competent but recklessly arrogant idiot who seemed to possess no sense of spatial awareness, constantly finding new and inventive ways to get himself injured in back alleys.
She knew all of that. She understood the vicious nature of his world. She knew that getting shot or stabbed was more or less baked into the job description of a mafia don.
And yet, despite all of her cold, clinical logic, the fear she felt was real.
It was uncomfortable in her chest, a glaring, undeniable testament to a truth she had been actively trying to ignore: without her ever fully realizing it, or giving him permission to do so, Dante Fazzari had somehow become a genuine, immovable part of her life.
Cassia swallowed hard, forcing the sudden tightness out of her throat.
"How bad is it?" Cassia demanded, her voice dropping into its authoritative, medical register as she spun around on her heel, marching straight back into the locker room to grab her leather medical kit.
"A blade to the shoulder, deep tissue, and another laceration across the ribs," Zoran reported quickly. "He is bleeding heavily, but he is conscious. We had to relocate."
"Send me the address," Cassia ordered, already zipping the medical bag shut. "I’m on my way."
The text message arrived a second later. She didn't call a taxi. She walked briskly out of the hospital, ignoring the biting chill of the evening wind, and hailed the first available cab on the street, barking the coordinates at the driver with a tone that brooked no argument.
The address Zoran had provided led her far away from the polished, historic center of Rome.
The taxi dropped her off on the edge of a sprawling industrial district, an area characterized by cracked pavement, flickering amber streetlamps, and massive, corrugated steel buildings that looked abandoned to the naked eye.
Cassia paid the driver and stepped out into the cool night air, clutching her medical bag tightly.
As the taillights of the cab faded into the distance, a figure stepped out from the deep shadows of a nearby loading dock. It was Marco. The enforcer didn't have his weapon drawn, but his hand hovered near his jacket. He relaxed visibly when he saw her face under the streetlamp.
"Dr. Thorn," Marco said, nodding respectfully. "This way. Quickly, please."
Cassia followed him through a side door that looked rusted shut but opened smoothly on oiled hinges.
The interior of the building was a massive, cavernous warehouse.
The ceiling was lost in the gloom of exposed steel beams, but the center of the concrete floor had been retrofitted into a highly functional, secure safe house.
There were wooden crates stacked to form makeshift walls, banks of tactical monitors glowing on folding tables, and a dozen heavily armed men standing sentry in the shadows.
In the center of the cleared space, sitting on a worn leather couch beneath a harsh, industrial halogen work light, was Dante.
Cassia marched across the concrete floor, her boots echoing sharply in the vast space.
When she finally reached the center of the room and laid eyes on him, all the cold, sickening fear that had gripped her in the hospital hallway instantly evaporated, replaced by a wave of furious, boiling exasperation.
Dante’s white dress shirt was ruined, soaked in dark crimson down his left side. He was pale, a thin sheen of sweat gleaming on his forehead, but the moment he saw her striding toward him, a slow, devastating smirk curved his lips.
Cassia stopped in front of the couch. She dropped her medical bag onto a nearby wooden crate with a loud, aggressive thud.
She crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at the Don of the European underworld with the exact same expression of weary disappointment she might give a particularly slow, disobedient child who had just touched a hot stove for the third time.
Dante looked up at her, thoroughly amused despite the blood currently pooling against his ribs.
"Good evening, Cassia," Dante murmured, his voice slightly strained but dripping with his usual velvet charm.
"I apologize for the late hour. But, in my defense, I sort of expected this one.
It was a territorial dispute. And I tried my best not to get stabbed in the wrong place, so as not to give you too much trouble tonight. "
Cassia stared at him, her pale blue eyes narrowing into slits of pure ice.
"What on earth is wrong with you?" Cassia snapped, her voice echoing sharply against the high ceilings of the warehouse.
Zoran, who was standing a few feet away wrapping a minor bandage around his own knuckles, paused and looked over, a wide grin spreading across his face.
"I am serious, Dante, you are a moron," Cassia continued, uncrossing her arms to rip open the zipper of her medical bag.
She pulled out a pair of nitrile gloves and snapped them onto her hands with vicious force.
"What kind of mob boss gets hurt this constantly?
Are you incapable of anticipating a blade, or do you just enjoy the sensation of steel puncturing your vital organs? "
Dante let out a low chuckle, though he winced slightly as the movement pulled at his torn shoulder. He didn't seem even remotely offended by her barrage of insults. He found her fury magnificent.
"It is a hazardous profession," Dante reasoned smoothly, leaning forward slightly so she could access the wound. He looked up at her, the amusement dancing in his pale green eyes. "Besides, I have a doctor in my life now. I don't really need to worry about it anymore, do I?"
Cassia froze. She was holding a bottle of antiseptic wash in one hand and a stack of sterile gauze in the other.
The casual, arrogant assumption in his voice bypassed every single one of her carefully constructed defenses. Before her brain could engage the pragmatic filter she usually relied upon, the exhaustion and the lingering, terrified adrenaline from the hospital hallway hijacked her tongue.
"So does that mean it’s okay for you to worry me instead?" Cassia shot back.
The moment the words left her mouth, the vast, echoing warehouse went dead silent.
Zoran stopped wrapping his knuckles. Marco, standing by the monitors, slowly turned his head.
Dante went perfectly still.
For a brief, suspended moment, he was caught off guard.
He stared up at her, his icy eyes widening a fraction of an inch as her words echoed in the space between them.
She had admitted to worrying about him. Dr. Cassia Thorn—the impenetrable fortress, the woman who claimed he was nothing more than biology and bad decisions—had just confessed that the thought of him bleeding in a warehouse had frightened her.
Underneath his surprise, a tectonic shift occurred in Dante’s chest. He felt something close to pure, unadulterated elation surge through his bloodstream, eclipsing the agonizing pain in his shoulder.
Cassia realized her slip instantly. A faint, treacherous flush of heat rose up the back of her neck, and she immediately retreated behind the highest, thickest wall of prickly defensiveness she could construct.
"You are like a pesky, unmanageable toddler," Cassia gritted out, uncapping the antiseptic with unnecessary force. "You can't manage to stay out of trouble for more than a day. Barely even two minutes, really, when I actually think about the timeline of your life."
She pressed the gauze roughly against the deep gash on his shoulder, making no effort to be gentle.