Chapter 2

Twenty minutes to get him up the stairs. The last flight I did on my knees.

He was heavier than he had any right to be, all shoulder and muscle and no help at all. By the time I got the door open I had blood on my sleeves and blood on my face. Somewhere on the second floor I'd bitten my lip, and I could taste that too.

Leaving him in the alley never got as far as a thought. I was a doctor and he was bleeding on my landing.

Bathroom floor, not the bed. Blood is easier to clean off tile. I had a bad feeling I'd be cleaning a lot of it.

The wound was a bullet entry, high in the left shoulder. It wouldn't kill him in a minute.

It would kill him if he was stupid about it. A nicked vessel, blood coming out slow and steady while the body shut down everything else to patch the hole.

He had a gun.

It was in the back of his waistband, black and still warm. I took it out.

My father's men had carried them my whole childhood. This was the first time one had ever been in my hand.

I put it in the cabinet above the sink and shut the door on it.

I worked on him like he was anyone. Saline first, then pressure, my palm flat over the gauze until the bleed slowed underneath it.

Up close he was built for work nobody puts in writing. The forearms were layered over with old scar tissue nobody had bothered to close properly.

The blood made him look worse than he was. Red down the jaw, across the throat, the collarbone catching the light.

On anyone else it would have read as ruin. On him it didn't. He looked like a man who had won, and the blood was only what the winning had cost him.

I pushed it away and reached for the forceps.

I had lidocaine for a face laceration and nothing near enough of it for this. I went in anyway.

He made no sound at all. I'd taken glass out of men twice his age who screamed at the swab.

The bullet had gone in at an angle and stopped against muscle. I had to widen the track to bring it out straight, and I felt the moment his whole body decided not to move.

Not relaxed. Held. A man putting his hand flat on a table and leaving it there.

Blood came up warm over my knuckles.

One bulb over the sink. I worked by feel. The forceps found metal. I turned my wrist and brought it out.

It landed in the dish with a small clean sound.

Then his hand closed on my wrist, high up, hard enough that I felt the bones shift. I held where I was.

His eyes were open, amber, and there was nothing in them that wasn't awake. "Who are you," he said. There was no question mark anywhere in it.

"Let go of me," I said. "You lost a lot of blood. Stay still. You move, you open it, I start again."

He looked at me, then at my hands, then at the blood on my coat, which had been his an hour ago and was mine now.

Then he let go and his eyes closed. "Fine," he said. "Finish."

He held still through the stitches too. He'd been shot before, and somewhere along the way he'd decided it wasn't worth showing.

The floor was cold. Hypothermia keeps more patients than bleeding does, so he got a blanket. Then I sat down with my back against the tub and meant to rest ten minutes.

I slept.

When I woke my neck was bent and the light was wrong. Gray and low. A city at nine in the morning.

He was still out. His color had come back and the bandage was clean.

He needed antibiotics. There was a pharmacy two blocks over where I knew the pharmacist, and I could be back before he woke.

The gun stayed in the cabinet. He stayed on the floor.

I stood over him a second.

Eight years of building something my father couldn't touch. And here I was on a bathroom floor at nine in the morning, cleaning up after his world again.

The lock turned behind me. Which was stupid, because if he woke he couldn't get out. I did it anyway.

The man waiting on my doorstep hadn't come to ask a question.

He was bigger than the man on my bathroom floor and considerably better dressed. The suit alone had cost more than everything in the room behind me. He stood in the frame of my door with two men behind him who weren't there to help anybody carry anything.

I knew the type. I'd eaten dinner across from it since I was a child.

This one had a name. Bruno. He'd stood behind my father's chair since I was nine, and he'd gone gray at the temples doing it.

He came through my doorway without shortening his stride, as if the door had been expecting him.

"Miss Marino," he said. "Come with me. Bring your bags."

"Excuse me?"

"You don't get to ask questions," he said. "We leave now. Your father is waiting. So is Don Bellini."

The whole day started again. The security officers. The nurses' station. The walk home I didn't remember taking.

And I was a Marino. Marinos don't get what they want by asking.

"I can't—" It was out before I had it. "I'm married. I got married. So I can't marry Bellini."

Four words in and I could hear how thin it was. I kept going anyway, because the alternative was the car downstairs.

Bruno's chin came up. "Married," he said. "Married within a day. Who is your husband — him?"

He was looking past me. I turned.

There was a man standing behind me.

Shirt open all the way down. A white square of bandage at his shoulder.

He was supposed to be asleep on my bathroom floor.

He walked past me before I could get a word out. He went by close enough that I got the soap off him, and the last of the blood, and the heat.

He put an arm around my waist and pulled me in against his side. Easy. No hesitation anywhere in it, as if the spot had been his for years.

The shirt hung open and his skin was against my arm, still running too hot from the night I'd spent watching it. I didn't pull away. I couldn't have told anyone why.

"She is my wife," he said.

His voice was low. The hallway went quiet under it.

"I asked you a question," Bruno said. "I asked who—"

"Wrong question," the man said, without raising his voice.

I watched Bruno stop talking.

He looked down at me then. He'd gone through every second of it without once looking at me.

"Ask me what I'll do to the next man who comes for my wife."