Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Where did that leave us? Five am? Six? Somewhere around there.
The city would be waking up soon, early birds chasing that proverbial worm, the health-conscious strapping on their sneakers to run the streets or parks before they were too packed to provide any peace.
I didn’t know where I was. But I did know there was no such thing as a desolate area of the city. People were piled on top of each other in every corner of the place.
So if I screamed… someone would hear me.
That was kind of the perk to living alone in a big city. You were never truly alone. If you screamed loud enough for long enough, someone would eventually get sick of it and call the cops.
What can I say? Us city folks weren’t nice but we gave a damn on occasion.
Decision made, I sucked in a deep breath, fought with my insecurity about it—decades of being told to be a good girl, to be quiet, to never draw too much attention to myself—and screamed.
I screamed until my lungs hurt, until my throat felt raw, until defeat made frustrated tears flood my vision.
It was right then, in one of my lowest moments, that the door opened up again.
This time, it wasn’t “Maine” who came in, but Surgeon himself.
Stepping inside, he leaned back against the door, crossing his arms over his strong chest.
“You done?” he asked.
Was I done?
Was I done?
Oh, no.
No, I was just getting started.
CHAPTER FOUR
Salvatore
“Ah, yeah, so… that was nasty as fuck,” Cesare said as I washed the blood off my hands, watching as it mingled with the soap and water, becoming a milky pink color instead of the stark red that was on my pants and the tweezers I hadn’t sanitized yet.
“That didn’t even make the top ten nasty wounds I’ve seen,” I told him, shrugging. “Only the third woman I’ve treated, though,” I said, thinking back.
What can I say? The mafia was a historically male-centric profession.
“That’s because there’s only one Family with female capos,” Cesare said, making my gaze slide in his direction. “The Lombardis,” he told me.
“How the fuck do you know that? We don’t have any kind of intel on their organization.”
And from what I heard, the attempted peace talks between our two Families were going nowhere. Not even our alliance with the Esposito Family had softened the Lombardis feelings toward us. Or, truth be told, ours to them.
“Pillow talk,” Cesare said, smirking over the memory of the dumbest mistake of his life. “Kind of smart, if you ask me.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, grabbing a towel to dry my hands.
“Because who the fuck would know? It’s the perfect way to get intel or sneak up and handle business without someone getting suspicious.”
That was fair.
“So what now?” Cesare asked, looking over at Whitney’s unconscious body, now almost completely covered in a sheet.
Cesare had tried to talk me into just pulling up her skirt and down her shirt, worried the woman would lose her shit if she woke up nearly naked. But with the way she was bleeding, I reasoned that it might have freak her out more if she woke up with giant stains of blood all over her.
“Now we wait until a respectable hour to call Lorenzo to see what the next move is,” I told him, tone a little pointed.
Cesare was used to working alone, to not needing to run shit past the boss. Things didn’t work like that in the city.
“Why not just call him now?” Cesare asked, checking his phone.
“Because he’s got a fussy baby that’s keeping him up all the time as it is. He needs to get some sleep here and there, or he’s not going to be thinking straight. We have this under control for the time being,” I told him, slapping a hand on his shoulder as I went toward the door.
As I moved out, I could have sworn I heard him mumble under his breath, “You call this under control?”
I didn’t bother responding.
Because, yes.
It was under control… enough.
The bullets were out. The bleeding had stopped. She was unconscious. There were no signs so far of her being in any sort of imminent danger.
We could give Lorenzo a couple hours to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
That decision had nothing at all to do with the fact that Whitney was the prettiest patient I’d ever had.
That would be fucking ridiculous.
I was way too goddamned old to base any sort of decisions on that kind of thing.
Going back to the waiting room of the defunct doctor’s office, I found her purse, and pulled the wad of cash I found sticking out of her bra, and slipped it into her wallet, bloodstains and all. Money was money whether it was covered in plasma or glitter from a stripper’s ass crack. It was the bank’s problem to take it out of circulation if it wasn’t fit to spread around.