Chapter 3 - A King’s Vigil
For seventy-two hours, the fifth floor of Bellevue Private Pavilion was the most heavily fortified location on the East Coast.
Snipers sat on the roofs of surrounding buildings. Plainclothes guards occupied every stairwell. The NYPD attempted to investigate the garage shootout, but Dante’s team of high-powered attorneys wrapped the department in so much red tape that the detectives couldn’t even get a list of witnesses. The street war was coming, everyone knew it, but inside Room 502, time had stopped.
Clara lay in a medically induced coma. Machines hummed around her bed like mechanical guardians. Tubes snaked into her arms, delivering blood, antibiotics, and pain medication, while a ventilator hissed rhythmically, breathing for her shattered lungs.
Dante had not slept. He had not changed his shirt until Rosa personally forced him into a clean black sweater. He sat in a high-backed leather chair beside Clara’s bed, his dark eyes never leaving her pale, bruised face.
On the table beside her lay three thick manila folders.
Mateo entered the room silently, holding a hot cup of coffee he knew Dante wouldn’t drink. “Boss. The financial accounts are cleared.”
Dante didn’t look up. “Tell me.”
“Every single cent of her late father’s medical debt—all four hundred and eighty thousand dollars—has been paid in full,” Mateo reported. “We liquidated the collections agency that was harassing her. They won’t be bothering anyone ever again. Her apartment lease in Queens has been paid five years in advance, though… I doubt she’ll ever go back there.”
“She won’t,” Dante said flatly. “What about the hospital where her father died?”
“Purchased through a holding company this morning,” Mateo replied. “You now own it. The administration staff who sent her father’s bills to collections have been terminated.”
Dante finally looked at Mateo. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with dark circles. “And the rat?”
Mateo hesitated, taking a step back. “We picked up trace radio signals originating from our private garage in Oyster Bay two hours before the MRI run. Someone used an encrypted burner phone to hit a cell tower in Jersey. The recipient was Marco Russo’s inner circle.”
Dante’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched violently under his skin. Marco Russo. The head of the rival family who had been trying to reclaim the Manhattan docks for three years. Russo thought he was playing chess, striking at Dante’s mother to provoke a sloppy retaliation. He hadn't counted on a girl from Queens stepping into the path of five bullets.
“Do not touch Russo yet,” Dante commanded quietly. “If we strike now, he will know we have a leak. I want the rat brought to me alive once Clara opens her eyes.”
“And if she doesn faint…” Mateo began, then stopped himself, intimidated by the sudden darkness in Dante’s gaze.
“She will wake up,” Dante said, his voice laced with absolute conviction.
He reached out, his thick, scarred fingers carefully hovering over Clara’s small, pale hand. He was afraid to touch her, afraid his rough hands would break what was left of her fragile body.
Slowly, tenderly, he let his index finger rest against her palm.
“You bought my mother time, Clara,” he whispered into the quiet room, his gravelly voice softening to a tone Mateo had never heard in fifteen years of service. “Now I buy you the world. Wake up. Please.”
As if hearing his command across the deep fog of sedation, the monitors shifted. The oxygen levels rose. Clara’s eyelashes fluttered—a tiny, agonizingly slow movement against her pale skin.
Dante stood up so fast his chair slammed against the wall. He leaned over the bed, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped beast.
“Clara?”
Her lips parted, dry and cracked. A tiny, raspy breath escaped her throat. Her eyelids strained, fighting the crushing weight of the anesthetic, until finally, two bright, moss-green eyes opened, unfocused and trembling, searching the light.
She didn’t see the IV lines. She didn’t see the armed guards at the door. She saw the dark silhouette of the mob boss leaning over her, his face twisted in raw, agonizing relief.
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“Dante…” she breathed, the sound barely audible over the hiss of the ventilator.
“I’m here,” he choked out, taking her hand and squeezing it, pressing his lips to her knuckles as tears finally spilled down his face. “I’m right here.”
