Fake Wife to the Mafia King

My father sold me to a man I had never met. He told me by text, eight years after he last spoke to me.

Nine tomorrow morning. Wait at your apartment. My people will come get you and take you to meet your fiancé.

He was a mafioso. I ran at eighteen to be free of him. Twenty-six now, and he could take the life I'd built out of nothing with a single message.

I typed back three words. Go to hell.

"Doctor Marino?"

I looked up. The program director was standing in the doorway of the workroom.

Two security officers with him, one on either side. I'd been in hospitals long enough to know the shape of a firing before anyone said the words.

"I'm sorry," he said. "As of right now, you can't keep working here. Collect your things."

"What?"

"Go ask your father."

"I have seven patients on my list tonight," I said. "Bed twelve is a post-op day two. Who's taking him?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "But this is no longer your place. Please leave. I won't ask again."

I was walked out past the nurses' station, past people I'd worked beside that morning, and not one of them looked up.

I walked home without really being in my body. Two fingers went to my collar and found the chain under it. My hand did that on its own. It had been doing it since I was six.

It was my mother's. She died the winter I turned six. I remember her hands better than her face.

She was the only warm thing I ever had. After she was gone I stopped asking anyone for anything.

I could pack tonight, get on a train, be gone by morning. I'd been packing that bag in my head since I was ten. It had never once made it down the stairs. It didn't matter where I went.

I cut through the alley.

A hand came over my mouth before I could scream.

Cold and wet, and it smelled like blood. The arm around me was strong. It hauled me backward into the dark, my shoulders hitting stone while I was still working out what was happening.

A voice said it very quietly, right against my ear.

"Don't move."

I went still. Not by choice.

The sleeve over my mouth was torn and the blood on my cheek wasn't mine. The training got there before my heartbeat did. This was a man hiding, and whatever he was running from had teeth.

He was cold everywhere except where he was bleeding.

Then the streetlight found his face. Black hair. Amber eyes. A face you'd see forty feet tall on the side of a building, selling something nobody in this alley could afford.

He got a hand on my waist and pressed me back into the brick. Then he bent in until his forehead was almost against mine, his palm still over my mouth.

His shoulders squared off to the street. From the sidewalk we'd read as one shape. A couple. Not worth the second glance you give people who are busy with each other.

His mouth stopped short of mine and stayed there.

He was breathing on my top lip. Under the blood he still smelled like whatever he'd been before tonight. Soap, and something drier and warmer beneath it.

I got all of it. There was nowhere else for the air to come from.

His chest was against mine. His heart was going faster than mine, and mine wasn't slow.

I should have been counting exits. I was trained to count exits.

Instead I was holding still for a stranger with a hole in him. Some part of me had gone very quiet and very interested, and it had no business doing either.

Then something warm ran under my fingers, and I remembered what I was actually touching.

Boots on the pavement. Several sets, coming fast.

Every part of him went rigid. I felt the shaking in the palm over my mouth.

The boots reached the alley and stopped. A man said, "Split up. He didn't go far."

One of them had a gun down at his side. It swung when he turned.

They took in the two of us. One second, maybe two. But the man over me had done this before, and I'd learned young how to disappear while standing still.

They moved on.

He didn't come off me for another long second. Then I felt the hold he had on himself let go.

His breath changed. Twice in an ER hallway I'd heard a man's breath do that. Both of them were on the floor before I could reach them.

"Hey," I said. "Hey."

His eyes rolled. His knees went.

He folded, all of it dropping onto me. I went down with him, my back to the brick, his dead weight across my chest. His blood soaked through my coat.

A car pulled in slow, laying white light over the brick and the trash and the two of us. That was worse than the footsteps. Footsteps were men guessing. A car meant somebody had given them the street.

Two hundred pounds of unconscious man on my chest, his blood between my fingers, and my father's voice arrived on schedule.

You don't know what he is. You don't know who wants him. Leave him.

I got an arm under him before it finished talking, and I heaved.

It took a while. I wasn't built for hauling a grown man. But I got him upright with my shoulder in his ribs and dragged him the other way, away from the car, toward my building.

I didn't know his name. I didn't know who the men were. I couldn't work out why a man with a bullet in him had picked my wall out of every wall in the city.

Behind me a car door opened.

"He's bleeding," a man said. "Follow the ground."

I made myself go faster.