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“Oh, baby, no.” I lift her in my arms as gently as I can and hold her close to my chest. She’s so cold. I have to warm her up. “Please, please, wake up. You have to wake up. Emilia, please.” Her head lolls against my shoulder, her body still. Lifeless.
“Check again,” Dante urges, kneeling beside me. “I might’ve missed it.”
I hear him, but I feel her. How cold she is. How stiff. My anguished cry echoes in the tight space. “God, no,” I moan out, rocking her, lost in grief and shock. She can’t be dead. I can’t lose everything.
Nico drops to one knee in front of me. “Set her down. Let go of her.” When he makes the mistake of trying to pull her from my grasp, I clutch her closer, screaming my rage. He still won’t let up, finally settling for pressing fingers to her neck.
With his other hand, he grips my shoulder. “I think I feel something. Set her down, goddammit!”
I don’t. I can’t let her go when she’s this cold. But I do press an ear to her chest, ignoring the dried trails of blood that paint her skin. I close my eyes, holding my breath, waiting.
There it is—a faint heartbeat. It’s not my imagination. “Get the car!” I bark out, and he takes off running along with my brother while I lift her, getting to my feet. As gently as I can, I run from the room. “Hold on, baby,” I plead. “Hold on. Don’t leave me.”
Dante is waiting outside beside the open door to the rear of the SUV. “She needs a hospital!” I demand, and he helps me get her into the back seat before I follow, lifting her head and cradling it in my lap so I can gaze down at her bloody, swollen face.
“Drive!” I scream, though we’re already moving. Not fast enough. Nothing short of flying would be fast enough.
Dante calls out orders to Nico, then barks into his phone. “We’re coming in with a wounded woman,” he tells whoever is on the other end of the call. “It looks like she’s been badly beaten, and we can only find a faint pulse. We’re going to need a room for her. No, not triage.” He snarls. “We’re taking her up to a private room. And you’re going to have it ready when we arrive. Do you think I give a fuck?” he shouts while Nico takes a corner without slowing down, making horns blare while the tires squeal.
I reach out and take the phone from him, holding it to my ear. A woman is babbling some useless bullshit about procedures and protocol, but I cut her off. “This is Luca Santoro,” I tell her, holding Emilia’s head still with my other hand when Nico takes another sharp turn. “And I don’t care what it takes. I will build your hospital a new wing if I have to in repayment, but you will take her straight up to a private room. No names will be used. Doctors and nurses will treat her discreetly. She’s unconscious, barely breathing. It appears she has a head wound.” Her blood is seeping into my pants as I speak. Her heart is still pumping, if weakly.
“Sir, she will need to be assessed in triage,” the woman insists.
“Fuck triage!” I shout. “And fuck you if you don’t do what I say. I will have your goddamn job, do you understand? We’ll be there in…”
“Three minutes,” Nico grunts as we blow through a red light.
“Three minutes,” I repeat. “Be ready.”
They’re ready.
A pair of nurses stand outside the main entrance to the hospital with a gurney between them. Dante helps me get Emilia out of the car, and together, we lay her across the gurney, following the nurses who rush it inside. I don’t know the answers to most of the questions they fire at us—whether she’s allergic to any medications, her blood type, her medical history. There hasn’t been time to learn those things. We haven’t had enough time.
As for how she ended up this way, that’s a question with a heavier weight. For once, I’m glad my brother exists since he takes charge. “She’s a close friend of our family,” he explains in the elevator. “We found her this way. That’s as much as I can tell you, for your sake,” he adds.
I glance up from Emilia’s limp body in time to witness the nervous glance they exchange. “Help her,” I whisper, holding her hand. “Do whatever it takes. I’ll pay for all of it. Spare nothing.”
When the doors open, the nurses rush in with the gurney. “You’ll have to stay in the family waiting area outside her room,” one of them barks out at me while the other hits a button on the wall, automatically opening a large pair of doors. This is clearly where the hospital’s most affluent patients stay, in rooms split in half to allow their loved ones to set up camp comfortably.
The nurses take Emilia to the other half of the closest room, where a bed and equipment wait. When I try to follow them inside, Dante takes me by the arm. “Let them do their jobs,” he urges in a tight voice.
“Get off me,” I warn, growling and pulling away, but he’s determined to drag me away from Emilia and into the waiting area on the other side of the glass doors, which are quickly closed behind us. There’s nothing to do but watch helplessly from the next room as a nurse pulls the curtains, cutting me off from the center of my world.
Some generic talking head reads the news from a flatscreen television mounted against the wall behind me, droning on while I turn in a slow circle. The room is full of plush sofas and chairs. A full private bathroom and refrigerator are in the corner from which Dante pulls out a bottle of water. After gulping half of it down, he sighs. “They know what they’re doing. She’s going to pull through.”
I need to believe that. It’s the only thing holding me together as I drop into one of the chairs and hold my head in my hands. I hear voices overlapping in there, orders being barked back and forth.
What does she need? What’s it going to take to make her well?
Hours pass. Dante only leaves when somebody from the house comes with clothes for me to change into. “You don’t want her seeing you like this when she wakes up,” he tells me, thrusting the bag into my lap when I can’t be bothered to accept it.
Vinny arrives to keep watch. Dante keeps Papa updated over the phone when I can’t bring myself to speak. Night turns to morning. Somebody brings food. I barely notice any of it. Why haven’t they told me anything? Why hasn’t she woken up?
It’s past nine by the time a middle-aged man in scrubs enters the room, looking around. “Who is responsible for this girl?” he asks in a weary voice.
“She’s my fiancée,” I announce, springing from the chair and crossing the room in a few long strides. It doesn’t matter that it’s not technically true. “How is she? Has she woken up?”
He eyes me warily. “Somebody beat the hell out of her. Besides her face, there are bruised ribs, a lacerated liver and spleen, and ligature marks around the wrists and ankles,” he announces, and it’s clear he’s decided I’m the culprit.
