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I spied her medical chart on the outside of the door, so going back out there, I quickly snatched it and returned to the room. This was highly illegal, and a complete invasion of privacy, but I needed to know what had happened to her and nothing would get in my way. I skimmed through some of the pages. I was actually concerned for more than just her, so when I got to the end and didn’t find anything about the baby, I returned to the various results of all the blood work drawn. When I found the one that would confirm she was pregnant, there was a single word listed there.
“Negative?” I asked. It made no sense at all.
There was no way Viviana would’ve openly lied about something so vitally important, especially when it involved potential life or death consequences for herself. She acted as if she had nothing to live for, but I knew her false bravado for what it was. She had no death wish, especially after finally feeling as if she could live her life for herself for a change. She had fought me tooth and nail over this pregnancy, and had even fled to the Catalanos recently. Did she realize at that time that she wasn’t pregnant after all? Is that why she returned to me? She no longer feared for her life.
I shook my head. Of course, she still was worried about it. She begged me not to call the doctor, and one who could easily tell me that she wasn’t pregnant. She had nothing to gain by lying or pretending as if she was with child when she wasn’t. The emotion she felt whenever we or rather, I, would say about its future, couldn’t be faked by anyone, not even her. She was a damn good actress, but even she had her own limitations.
“I don’t under—”
“Excuse me. Who are you and where is the patient?”
I turned to find a nurse standing in the doorway. “I could ask you the same damn thing. Where in the hell is my fiancée? And what is going on with our baby?”
“Who are you?” she questioned again.
“Nazario Vaccaro. Viviana is my fiancée.” I had just basically said that, but I spelled it out as clearly as I could for her this time so there would be no misunderstanding between us. I also threw my name out there because it held weight in this city. It was feared countrywide, and I knew the moment she realized that.
“Miss Spataro was here a little while ago. Due to a bus accident, there were multiple patients so I, and some others, stepped away to help assist with...”
“She ran,” I said, then slammed my fist down on the counter. The nurse flinched, and I forced myself to keep my anger in check. “What condition was she in?”
I could tell the woman was hesitant to tell me much more, so I turned back to the chart. She noticed what I had and quickly came over and grabbed it from me. “We had examined her when she was brought in with non-life-threatening injuries. We wanted to X-ray her ribs and hip, as well as do a CT scan of her head, but we needed to make sure she was not pregnant.”
“But she is,” I said.
The woman flashed an apologetic smile at me. “She’s not, although we realized she believed herself to be. Miss Spataro got very upset and unhooked herself from the monitors. I was about to get her hooked back up to everything, when I was called to assist with the bus accident.”
“What is her current condition?”
The nurse explained that other than some bumps and bruises, she believed Viviana would make a full recovery. The doctors had wanted to run some tests to rule out fractures, internal bleeding, and even a concussion. This was a very Viviana thing to do. She had been running almost all of her adult life. Once upon a time, she had run toward danger, but lately, she was running from what she perceived to be the same. What she didn’t realize in her impetuous haste was that she was in even more trouble than she ever thought because she couldn’t tell friend from enemy any longer. She was allowing sentiment to cloud her judgment, and because of that, she was in grave danger. Right now, I was who she was trying to escape, and it was ironic because I am the only one who could actually keep her safe.
She didn’t have a car to use so as I left the hospital, I pulled out my cellphone. When Luca answered on the second ring, I wasted no time. “Viviana has run, and is injured. Check out the airports and bus stations, then get back to me right away.”
I hung up and rushed back to my car. I needed to go home because if she had fled the city or country, I would need my passport in order to follow her. I was so tempted to punish the hell out of her once I did find her, but I knew she honestly didn’t know what kind of danger she was in. I had it on good authority that the one who tried to kill her had been a Catalano. From witness testimony, it sounded a lot like Andrea.
Viviana was so damn hardheaded that she would never believe me. It was one of the reasons why I had Luca pulling up whatever he could on the license plate caught on another driver’s cell phone camera. I’d need that to convince her that her “so-called friends” were actually more foe than anything else. They didn’t give a damn about her if it meant hurting me. She was my fiancée and I had been the one who she had ultimately chosen when she most recently left Sicily. It couldn’t have sat well with them, and seeing who I was to their family, it had to have stung more.
She thought my father simply framed them for the death of my mother, but when I had been exploring other documents in my father’s safe, I realized the connection between our families went much deeper. A year before Angelo’s death, he had sexually abused my mother and when my father found out, he’d killed him. It was truly an eye for an eye scenario, and it was the reason there was little retaliation. It also explained why they were more than willing to train Viviana, because they essentially used her as a weapon against my family. When she spurned them for me, she lost all usefulness and was now expendable as evidenced by the car accident.
I finally arrived home and any hope that she came to her senses and returned there was squashed when I checked her room and ours. I shook my head, then I grabbed my passport and as I got back in my car, Luca called back. “What do you have?”
“She did go to the airport and used her credit card to purchase a one-way ticket to LaGuard—”
“New York City,” I said, cutting him off. Why in the hell would she go back to the one place she openly admitted multiple times was her least favorite place in the entire world.
I was truly worried about her frame of mind. Viviana was far too temperamental on a good day, and it made me think about what others would say. It went something along the lines of not being there at someone’s worst, then you didn’t deserve to be there at their best. It didn’t truly apply because I had seen this girl at her lowest points ever, and they all used to revolve around my father. She hated Stefano with a passion that outweighed logic. As I remembered the night before when I had her at knifepoint in the cell, she had been furious. Her passion had made for a few explosive orgasms, but when I had told her about the doctor, her entire expression changed.
Her dark eyes had turned black, and they were hollow. I usually saw something in those darkened depths when I’d peer into them, but not for a few seconds last night. When she blinked and allowed her emotion to come through, something now dawned on me that hadn’t then. She wasn’t looking at me with the same annoyed arousal, but rather something stronger. She actually looked at me the same way she would my father before he was murdered. I had truly become my father’s son and while I had thought it before and didn’t allow it to bother me, it nearly gutted me now.
“Amore mio,” I said aloud, then rested my forehead against my steering wheel for a few long seconds.
Viviana was my love, and I doubted she even knew. I used to think Kristalina was the only one who’d been that for me, but looking back, love was what I had called it, but it wasn’t what it had been. I’d been devastated when she was killed, but I didn’t have the same throbbing ache in my chest then that I had now. The farther away from me she got, the less likely that I would be able to find her, and ultimately reclaim her. I’d give anything to have her back in my arms right now, especially knowing in my world that what you had one second could so easily slip through your fingers in the next.
I had to eliminate the threat to her. I had to also make those responsible pay for even trying to take her from me. In the end, I had to trust I would find her because if I didn’t, I’d burn this fucking city to the fucking ground. I’d burn Palermo down, too.
“Do you want the jet plans set for America?” Luca asked.
I’d completely forgotten he was even still on the line. “No. Get the jet fueled and plans made for Sicily. We head to Palermo in an hour’s time. Have Daniel and Carlo find their location. I know they have to have made it back there by now. They will believe Viviana died and won’t know anything for certain until later.”
