Chapter 1 - The Blood on the Marble
The private elevator of the St. Jude Medical Facility in Upper Manhattan opened directly into the underground trauma bay.
Dominic did not wait for the gurney. He carried Meline through the double doors himself, his black suit coat soaked with her blood and the freezing rain of the Hudson. His knuckles were white against her waist and knees. Her skin felt like ice—a delicate, porcelain pale that made the crimson stain spreading across her shoulder look horrifyingly bright.
"Clear Bay One!" Dr. Vance shouted, sprinting down the corridor alongside two trauma nurses. Vance was the Vitiello family’s chief surgeon, a man who had pulled bullets out of Dominic’s father and patched up underbosses in dark basements for thirty years. He took one look at Dominic’s face and stopped asking questions. "Set her down here, Don Vitiello. Let my team work."
"Save her," Dominic said. His voice didn't sound like his own. It was raspy, hollow, stripped of the terrifying authority that usually made men tremble in his presence. "If she stops breathing, Vance, you don't leave this room alive."
"Dominic," Mateo said firmly, grabbing his boss by the arm and pulling him back as the nurses began cutting away Meline’s ruined silk gown. "Let them do their jobs. You are bleeding on her."
Dominic looked down at his hands. He wasn't shot, but his palms were smeared with his wife's blood. He had pressed his bare hands against her shoulder in the back of the SUV, trying desperately to hold her life inside her body while Mateo ran every red light on the West Side Highway.
The doors to the bay swung open again.
A tall man walked in, limping heavily. He was clutching a makeshift sling around his left arm, his charcoal suit shredded at the hip and covered in pulverized glass.
Lorenzo Castillion.
Dominic’s jaw locked. Every instinct he possessed—every rule of the New York underworld—demanded that he draw the weapon tucked into his waistband and put a bullet between the eyes of the Brooklyn Don standing inside his private facility.
Mateo moved instinctively, placing a hand on his holster. "Castillion. You're out of your jurisdiction."
Lorenzo didn't look at Mateo. He didn't look at the armed Vitiello enforcers lining the hallway. His dark, bruised eyes were fixed entirely on the stainless-steel table where the medical team was hooking Meline up to an IV line and an oxygen mask.
"She took a shell fragment from a grenade," Lorenzo said quietly. His voice was gravelly, strained by cracked ribs. "Salvatore’s men didn't just bring rifles to the Navy Yard. They brought heavy ordinance. My Aston Martin took the brunt of the blast, but the side glass imploded. A piece caught her shoulder."
Dominic stepped up to Lorenzo until their chests nearly touched. Dominic was taller, broader, but Lorenzo stood his ground without flinching.
"Why were you in the car with her?" Dominic snarled, his eyes pitch-black with a dangerous, unstable rage. "Why was my wife in Brooklyn with you?"
Lorenzo looked at Dominic with an expression that cut deeper than any blade. It wasn't anger. It was complete, unadulterated disgust.
"Because you locked her out in a freezing storm without a coat, Vitiello," Lorenzo spat, stepping into Dominic's personal space despite his broken ribs. "Because she crossed Manhattan on foot in silk heels to find a way to stop twelve shooters from blowing your head off at Pier Fourteen. And when she couldn't reach her own husband because he was playing the proud, paranoid King, she called the only man in this city who hates Salvatore enough to listen."
Dominic’s chest heaved. He wanted to strike Lorenzo. He wanted to tear down the walls of the hospital. But the brutal truth of Lorenzo's words paralyzed him.
"I gave her my coat," Lorenzo continued softly, his voice echoing through the sterile bay over the rhythmic beep of Meline’s heart monitor. "I gave her my word that my men would hit Salvatore’s convoy before they reached your pier. And when the glass blew out, she didn't duck. She was trying to reach for the burner phone to make sure the message got through to your cryptographer."
Lorenzo reached into his pocket with his uninjured hand, pulled out a small, blood-stained slip of paper, and slapped it against Dominic’s chest.
"She didn't trade your northern routes for money or power, Dominic," Lorenzo said, turning toward the door. "She gave me three months of transit access through Westchester—access I’m using to track down the men who killed my sister five years ago. She used your assets to buy your life. If you were half the man she thought you were, you would have looked at her hands instead of her phone."
Lorenzo walked out of the trauma bay, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the white linoleum floor.
Dominic stood frozen, the paper clutched in his fist. He unfolded it slowly.
In Meline’s elegant, precise handwriting, written on the back of a restaurant napkin before she was thrown into the street, were four lines:
May you like
If Dominic survives tonight, the Northern Routes are open to Castillion for 90 days. If Dominic dies, the deal is void. Keep my husband alive.
Dominic dropped to his knees right there in the hallway, the paper pressed against his face, as the sound of Meline’s failing pulse echoed through the room.
