Chapter 5 - AWAKENING TO ASH
The private intensive care suite on the eighth floor of Northwestern Memorial Hospital was dimly lit.
The steady, rhythmic *beep-beep-beep* of the heart monitor was the only sound cutting through the heavy silence. Clear IV lines snaked into both of Emily’s bruised arms, delivering fluids, antibiotics, and high-potency painkillers directly into her system.
Her face was paper-white, almost translucent against the bleached cotton pillowcase. Her lips were cracked, a small butterfly bandage covering a deep laceration on her left temple.
Dante sat in a hard vinyl armchair pulled flush against the side of her bed.
He had not washed. The drying blood of his wife was still caked into the cuffs of his dress shirt. The heirloom necklace—cleaned and restored to its original velvet box—sat on the bedside table beside a small plastic cup of ice chips.
Dante held Emily’s limp, cold hand between both of his large palms. His thumbs stroked the pale skin of her knuckles with agonizing gentleness, terrified that the slightest pressure might shatter her remaining strength.
Her eyelids fluttered.
Dante leaned forward, his heart slamming against his ribs like a sledgehammer. “Emily?”
A soft, broken moan escaped her dry lips. Her head turned weakly toward the sound of his voice. Her hazel eyes, clouded with anesthesia and heavy sedatives, slowly focused on his face.
For a split second, Dante saw a flicker of the girl who used to smile at him across the breakfast table, the girl who would gently straighten his silk tie before he walked out into a world of violence.
Then, terror struck.
Emily’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror. She gasped, a ragged, wheezing sound, and instinctively tried to wrench her hand out of his grip.
“No... no, please...” she sobbed, her voice barely a dry whisper. Her body strained against the hospital sheets, triggering an alarm on the monitor as her heart rate spiked to 140 beats per minute. “Don't... don't hurt them... please, Dante, don't let her take them...”
“Emily, stop, look at me,” Dante begged, rising out of the chair, his voice cracking with an emotion none of his capos had ever heard from him. “You’re safe. You’re in the hospital. Nobody is taking anything from you.”
“You signed it...” she wept, tears cutting clean tracks through the dust and dried blood on her cheeks. She was shaking so violently the IV poles rattled. “Vanessa showed me... she showed me your signature... you said I was worthless... you said I was just a baker’s daughter who didn't belong in your house...”
“I didn't sign it,” Dante said, his voice dropping to a desperate, broken plea. He fell to his knees beside the bed, bringing his forehead down to rest against the edge of the mattress. “Emily, look at me. Look at my eyes. I didn't sign anything. I would rather cut off my own hands than sign a document that took you away from me.”
Emily stared down at the top of his dark head.
In the eighteen months of their marriage, she had seen Dante Russo command boardrooms, dismiss multimillion-dollar payoffs, and stare down corrupt federal agents with cold amusement. She had never seen him bend his knee to any living soul.
Yet here he was, the king of Chicago, kneeling in hospital dust, weeping against her hand.
“The... the babies?” she whispered, her voice trembling so hard the words barely formed. “Dante... where are my babies?”
Dante lifted his head. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with red.
“They are alive, *mio cuore*,” he whispered softly. “They are fighting.”
He stood slowly, gently pressing a button on the wall to summon the head of the neonatal intensive care unit. Within moments, two nurses wheeled in a pair of high-tech mobile incubators, positioning them carefully on either side of Emily’s bed.
Inside the clear acrylic pods, surrounded by tiny sensors, thermal warming blankets, and miniature breathing tubes, lay two impossibly small human beings.
A boy and a girl.
Each was no larger than the length of Dante’s forearm. Their tiny chests rose and fell with the rhythmic assistance of the respirators, their translucent skin glowing pink beneath the warming lamps.
Emily looked from the left incubator to the right. Her breath hitched. A fresh wave of tears spilled down her face, but this time, they were not born of terror.
“A boy... and a girl?” she breathed, reaching out with a trembling hand toward the plastic casing of the nearest incubator.
“Alexander and Sophia,” Dante said softly, leaning over her shoulder, his hand hovering protectively just above hers. “If those names please you. If not, you can name them whatever you want. You can name them after the stars, and I will buy you the sky they hang in.”
Emily looked up into his face. The terror in her eyes had begun to recede, replaced by an ocean of profound, agonizing exhaustion.
“She made me wear a uniform, Dante,” Emily whispered, the memory cutting through her like a blade. “She threw away my mother’s locket. She told me you laughed when she suggested making me clean the guest rooms.”
Dante closed his eyes for a single second, absorbing the agony of her words like molten lead poured directly into his veins.
When he opened them, the tears were gone. Only the void remained.
“Sleep now, Emily,” Dante whispered, pressing a tender kiss to her bruised forehead. “Rest. Heal. Watch over Alexander and Sophia.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, her fingers weakly curling around the cuff of his bloody sleeve.
Dante looked down at her, his expression softening with a tenderness reserved solely for her.
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“I am going to finish what should have been ended a long time ago,” he said softly. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, Chicago will belong to you.”
***
