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“Fuck!” shouted Marco. I expected him to start firing out orders, but instead he dropped to his knees next to me.
My blood-covered hands were clamped over Alessio’s wound and Marco pressed his hands down on top of mine as if two sets of hands could help save Alessio.
Surprisingly, Juliana was the only one that was able to think straight. “We need cloths—clean cloths or plastic bags or anything like that! Someone get some!” she yelled.
When an officer came back a minute later with clean cloths, she grabbed them from him.
“Move your hands—now!” she instructed Marco and me.
Marco and I pulled our hands away for a moment to let her put the cloth over Alessio’s wound, her hands shaking as she did so.
I looked up at Marco. His face was stricken. “Alessio, stay with us. You’ve got to stay with us.” And then I heard him whisper, “I need you, man. I’ve always needed you.”
Alessio’s dark eyes had been flickering open and shut, but he could no longer fight it and he slipped away from us.
“Marco?” I sobbed.
“He’s going to be okay,” Marco said harshly. “Look at me, Cate, he’s going to be okay—he has to be.”
Marco kicked into action as Capo. “A doctor coming here won’t be able to do anything,” Marco said abruptly. “We need to get him to a hospital right away.” He shouted to his soldiers, “Get a vehicle ready and help me carry him out!”
“Should we be moving him?” I asked, worried that we might worsen his injuries.
“We’ve got no choice,” Marco said tersely. “He needs medical attention now, otherwise he’ll bleed out.”
Why couldn’t we be like normal families? If we were, we could just call for an ambulance. But I knew we couldn’t risk that because as soon as we got the authorities involved, the cops would be crawling all over the Fratellanza.
“What if we don’t get to the hospital in time?” I cried.
“We have to.” But I could see from Marco’s expression that, despite his words, he had the same thought as me.
Alessio was unconscious now and didn’t make a sound when they lifted his body up and carried him out to the waiting SUV. Marco and I got into the back with him, my hands still pressing down on his wound, trying to stem the blood flow. Juliana followed in another SUV with more soldiers.
By now I was covered in blood. Although Alessio was the one shot, I felt like someone was twisting a knife in my gut.
The drive to the hospital felt like the longest drive I had ever been on. I looked across at Marco whose mouth was set in a grim line. There was anger in his eyes, but there was also something else behind his expression—it was a look of fear. Not something that I would have ever thought I would see in the eyes of the Capo of the Fratellanza.
And the fact that he was scared made me shudder. My mind was so numb with terror that I couldn’t even pray. All I could do was stare at the blood seeping through my fingers and wonder how much longer until I would no longer feel the warmth from Alessio’s body and no longer feel the life in his soul.
My back was drenched in cold sweat, and I shivered. All the blood was making me feel nauseous, but I couldn’t stop staring at my hands which were covered with it, pressing tight to Alessio’s wound, trying to keep the life in his body.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Marco cursed. I knew he felt as powerless as me.
“I’m sorry.” My voice was quiet. “This whole mess is my father’s fault. He’s why the Russians are after us now.”
“The Russians are a bunch of fuckers. If it wasn’t this situation with your father, they would find some other reason to be at war with us.” Marco’s words were abrupt. But I knew that he was, in his own way, trying to let me know that he didn’t blame me.
Marco looked back at his brother. “Fuck, Alessio, you’ve got to keep fighting. Don’t give up. You’ve never given up on me before, so don’t stop now—don’t even think about it, man.”
“Have you rung ahead to the hospital to let them know we’re on our way?” shouted Marco to the soldiers in the front seats.
“Yes, boss. We’ve given them a rundown of the injury and an estimated time of arrival.”
By the time we reached the hospital, I had lost all sense of time. It had only been around twenty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. My body and mind felt like they were wading through a thick fog, and nothing seemed real anymore. I couldn’t think about anything except keeping Alessio here with me.
As I looked up at the hospital, I was even more terrified because I knew Alessio would be taken from me and that I might not feel his warm skin under my fingers again. I wanted to hold on to this moment, the feel of him, for as long as possible. But as soon as we pulled in through the gates of the private hospital, the doors of the SUV were wrenched open before the vehicle had even come to a halt.
I tried to keep my hands over his wound. “I need to stay with him, he needs me to help him—”
