by Bethany-Kris
Damian nuzzled his nose at the spot behind Lily’s ear as his words whispered over her skin like silk. “And you do know you’re mine, don’t you, sweetheart?”
Lily bit her inner cheek and said, “I know what is yours.”
“Good.” Damian’s fingers danced up her stomach and over her chest. Sparks bloomed on every spot he touched, waking Lily’s lust up even more. It was innocent enough, sure, but it felt entirely sinful at the same time. He stepped back, giving her just enough space to breathe. “I’ll keep reminding you when I think you need it.”
“You don’t play a clean game, Rossi.”
“Nothing about me is clean, DeLuca. Which you already know. Don’t act so surprised.”
Lily poked him in the chest. “What are you going to do when my last name is changed, huh?”
“I’ll be happy I can add another way to show you’re mine. And—”
Damian’s words cut off as his gaze caught something else. Lily followed his stare and noticed a dark suburban driving slowly down the road in front of the Trentini home. Terrance’s driveway, blocked by an iron gate, had filled with the leaving guests getting into their cars. The gate began to open.
The hair on the back of Lily’s neck prickled with the oddest sensation. Damian’s hold on her tightened the closer the suburban came to the front of the driveway. Despite the unusually warm Chicago air, Lily suddenly felt cold all over.
“Oh, it’s great to see them home,” came a loud voice from the doorway of the large home. “I’m sure they’ll be lovely in the wedding.”
Lily’s gaze traveled back to see Terrance giving his goodbyes to the Rossi twins. Joel, Abriella, and their parents stood on the steps with Terrance. Ben stood in front of his boss, saying his goodbyes, too.
“Get down,” Damian said.
Lily barely heard the words. “What?”
“Get down!”
Damian shoved her to the driveway with enough force to rattle her bones. Lily’s skin felt the effects of the asphalt as it scraped her knees and elbows. Her cry of pain was drowned out by the shattering scream of others as rapid assault fire filled the air. The fast popping shredded what serenity had been gained from the dinner.
Lily’s heart was in her throat, beating wildly out of control. Damian covered her body with his own, whispering calm assurances in her ear.
“Shhh, sweetheart, it’s okay,” Damian murmured.
Lily didn’t believe him. She couldn’t breathe as the fear swept over her body with damning intent. Sickness welled in her gut as she clenched her fists against the driveway. Glass exploded around them as bullets rained into her Maserati. She heard the calls of people shouting for others.
There were kids in the driveway.
Her friends were in the driveway.
Damian was in the driveway.
“We’re okay,” Damian told her like he knew she needed to hear it.
Lily trembled, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t hide her face. Damian had laid them flat beside the car for safety. She had just enough view from around the wheel well to see someone inside the black suburban toss out three glass bottles with burning rags sticking out of the tops. The bottles crashed over the top of two vehicles much closer to the gate than Lily’s was. The moment the bottles broke, fire lit up across the cars, engulfing them in flames.
Damian’s hands ran up and down Lily’s sides, soothing her without saying another word. She still shook like a leaf in the wind, but it wasn’t as bad with him there.
The screech of tires broke Lily from her daze. The black suburban disappeared before Lily could get another good look at it. Damian wasted no time rolling off her and standing. He lifted Lily’s stunned, shaking body up from the ground as if she weighed nothing more than a feather.
“Hey, hey,” Damian said, his tone calm and sweet in her ear.
Lily couldn’t see him through the haze of panic controlling her senses.
“Lily, look at me!”
Blinking away the confusion, Lily stared at Damian’s concerned features. Worry wrote lines over his brow as a frown curved his lips downward. His palms held her face tight in his hands, forcing her to keep looking at him.
“What just happened?” Lily asked, knowing but still unsure. She didn’t want to admit to herself what she already knew. Not again. Why did this happen again?
Before he could answer, sirens and lights blew past the Trentini home.
“Shit,” Damian hissed, glaring to the side.
Several unmarked police cruisers blocked the gate of the house, keeping anyone inside from leaving. Police spilled from the vehicles with guns drawn while several more unmarked cars with their lights flashing brightly continued on down the road in the direction of the black suburban.
Lily’s confusion only climbed higher. “Why are they here? How did they—”
“Issues with the mob,” Damian said quickly in explanation. “We’ve been all over the news. Terrance was bound to have somebody watching his goddamn house. What did you see, Lily?”
Unable to answer Damian because her lungs just wouldn’t work properly, Lily stared around at the mess instead. People were helping others off the ground. A lot of guests seemed to have hit the pavement like Lily and Damian had. At the front of the house where the Trentini family had been standing with her uncle and the Rossi twins, a far more devastating scene took shape.
People were shouting, shoving … others on the ground, unmoving. Red stained the pristine white door. Cara Rossi sobbed, her fists shoved in her mouth as she cried out. Tommas rushed up the stairs to his sister’s side.
Where was the other Rossi twin?
Where was Lea?
“Ben!” someone shouted.
Lily’s ears felt like they were ringing from the gunfire and the catacomb of sounds surrounding her now. She couldn’t concentrate enough to understand what the people on the stairs said to one another, but there was fear all over their actions, in their shaking hands and the tears streaking down their faces.
Theo clamored up the steps after Tommas. “Ben!”
Terrance fell back from one of the bodies on his front steps. He put his hands out in front of him, his gaze trained in on the morbid red covering his skin.
“Lea!” Laurent screamed.
Serena Rossi’s devastated cry followed her husband’s from somewhere down with the rest of the people in the driveway.
God.
More blood.
So much more.
“Lily!” Damian snapped.
He tilted her chin up so he could look down into her eyes in that intense way of his that stopped her heart and made her think there was so much more to this man than she could ever possibly know. She was trying so desperately to keep from falling for him, but something about him that she couldn’t deny spoke to her. Something that kept making her trip over her own two feet, surprising her at every turn.
She was falling fast and hard.
He wasn’t even trying.
Damian swept his thumb over her trembling lips. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” Lily said quickly. “I saw nothing.”
For him, Lily would never see anything.
It had nothing to do with the Outfit.
It was Damian.
Damian nodded. “That’s right, sweetheart. It’s always nothing.”
The hospital emergency room was packed to the rim. Every time Lily turned around, more people seemed to flood the waiting chairs. But with no seats left to take, people were left hanging around doors and littering the outside with cigarettes.
Shaking hands, quiet murmurs, and paranoid stares had become common place. Guessing by some of the discussions filtering in around Lily, she knew the families were pissed and planning. This—whatever this attack had been—would not go unanswered.
War, someone hissed.
Going to the mattresses, said another.
Lily felt sick.
Barely anyone talked to Lily and Damian as the
y stayed close together in a corner while they waited on news. Some had already come. News that wasn’t good and cut as deeply as it could get. Damian seemed calm on the outside, but Lily had to wonder if it was nothing more than a lie. The man wore too many masks for her to tell.
Lea Rossi died thirty minutes after being admitted into an OR for surgery. She’d lost far too much blood and by the time the paramedics reached the scene, there was very little they could do. The cops, with their barricades and questions, refused to let anyone leave the confines of the Trentini estate. The Rossi family received the news about their daughter while police hounded them with questions.
That was how they found out Lea died.
Lily suppressed a shudder, remembering the sound of Cara’s cries. It was not an easy thing to hear, but it was even worse to learn the news with people and cops surrounding you. There was no privacy for the family, no seclusion for their hearts to break.
No, their pain simply shattered over wet asphalt while guests and police looked on.
The black suburban hadn’t been found. Cops lost the trail as far as Lily understood.
“I’m sorry,” Lily told Damian for what felt like the hundredth time.
Damian squeezed her knee tightly. “Don’t be.”
“But—”
His blue eyes burned into hers with not a sign of wetness behind the irises.
“Don’t be,” Damian repeated. “I chose this.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Damian walked through the quiet ICU with a smooth stride and his head down. Snatching the white lab coat off the back of a nurse’s chair while the guy was distracted by a pretty face had been easy enough. It appeared like Damian’s attention was thoroughly engrossed by the information on the clipboard he’d stolen from a station outside of the ICU, but actually, he was surveying the people around him.
Like always, barely anyone noticed him as he strolled through the hospital’s unit with his white lab coat, dark slacks, and the stethoscope slung carelessly around his neck as any good doctor would do. Between work, patients, and visitors, the nurses on staff were kept busy and constantly moving from one thing to the next. They didn’t have time to question the unknown doctor on the floor who could be there simply by request of another doctor or patient’s family.
Ben, being a high ranking member in the Outfit, had been appointed a guard by Terrance’s request, but Damian had watched that man, too. He had a habit of running down to the cafeteria to grab a bite to eat at lunch and then he was relieved by another guard around supper. He was rarely gone more than ten, fifteen minutes at the most.
But it was enough time.
The drawn blinds on room 6B gave a bit of privacy as Damian stepped inside and closed the door. He locked the door even though he didn’t believe someone would interrupt his time. Damian didn’t bother to flick the lights on in the room as he glanced around at the beeping machines showing life and making their usual noise. The steady hiss of oxygen and the pump of the ventilator echoed in the space.
Ben DeLuca laid beneath stark white sheets, tucked safely in their confines. The man’s eyes were shut and he stayed prone on the bed as Damian crossed the space to get a better look at him. A tube inserted through Ben’s throat was attached to the ventilator, keeping him breathing and alive.
For now.
Comatose.
Well, as long as the doctors planned to keep him that way, anyway. The three bullets that the man took shattered a vertebra, tore a bad hole through Ben’s right lung, and the third lodged just above his temple. He would likely never walk again, be paralyzed from the shoulders up, and life wouldn’t be what it once had been for the DeLuca king.
But he was alive.
The coma had been nothing more than a medical decision designed to give Ben’s older body a chance to recover more without pain, emotional distress, and distractions. The ventilator had been needed to support Ben’s damaged lungs. According to Dino and the paperwork Ben’s wife Carmela received in order to continue on with the medically induced coma, Ben would have a better chance of long term recovery—as best that could be expected—if they went this route.
That couldn’t happen at all.
Lily DeLuca needed to be safe in all aspects.
Ben was a problem when it came to that. Hell, the man was a problem because he simply decided he didn’t like Damian. Even from a hospital bed, the man could cause problems. The power of a frail, manipulative man should never be underestimated.
Especially once everything was found out. Lily would always be safe. That didn’t make Damian any less pissed.
Every single time he thought about the eight bullet holes in the back of Lily’s Maserati, his rage boiled, threatening to take him under with the poisoned heat. Too close. That had been far too close.
Setting the useless clipboard aside, Damian unbuttoned the dress shirt he wore underneath the stolen lab coat. Ben’s chest continued to rise and fall in a rhythmic fashion alongside the ventilator’s timing.
The monitors keeping track of Ben’s heartbeat and breathing from the three leads attached to his chest became a game of sorts to Damian. He watched the lines strike up with every heartbeat and the green line monitoring breathing function fly up in time with the ventilator. Every minute or so, the screens would blink out and reset themselves. It gave a quick few second interval that Ben’s vitals weren’t being monitored.
The ventilator itself was on an entirely different monitor. There were no leads attached for that particular device, but Damian knew it would send out a warning sound to the front station if it was somehow turned off.
Damian didn’t plan on turning it off.
Not a flicker of hesitation or concern could be found in Damian’s emotions as he continued watching the monitors and Ben’s lifeless figure. His own heartrate was calm and his breathing steady. Never had killing someone felt so entirely natural to Damian. He’d always thought a lot about his victims before a job was done, but this one didn’t feel the same at all.
Lily had a lot to do with that, of course.
When the monitors blinked out again, resetting their tables, Damian quickly unplugged the leads coming from Ben’s chest to the monitor. Before the machines could recognize that they no longer had a set of wires to track, Damian attached another set of leads into the machines.
Earlier, after he’d grabbed the lab coat with the nametag attached, he’d used it to get inside a supply room. There, he’d found vital leads in designated bins. Quickly, so he couldn’t be caught, he followed the instructions on the covering of the underside of the sticky leads and attached all three leads to his own chest and abdomen.
As the monitor finally reset itself, Damian watched as his own vitals lit up the screen. There was little to no change between his heartrate and what Ben’s had been. Keeping an eye on the ventilator breathing for Ben, Damian inhaled and exhaled in time with the machine so that the green line monitoring breathing function would remain the same, too. As long as the monitors continued reading that everything was normal, the ventilator would remain stable and without warning.
Damian waited for the monitor to blink out again. When it did, he slipped the oxygen monitor clamped over Ben’s finger onto his own. Now, the blue line keeping track of the oxygen saturation inside the body wouldn’t read anything different, either.
“You’ll get it a hell of a lot easier than most of my hits have, Ben,” Damian said, knowing the man couldn’t hear him anyway.
Damian reached over and unclipped the ventilator tube from the attachment at Ben’s mouth. Air hissed from the tube as the machine pushed a steady stream of oxygen through. Immediately, Ben’s chest decompressed from the lack of air.
Damian continued breathing in time with the now useless machine. The monitors never changed. They never gave off the warnings they should have to the front desk as a patient was dying in his bed.
A shadow crossed the blind covered windows in front of Ben’s room but kept on going straight past. Damian
waited a good three minutes and then he waited another two. All the while, his breathing stayed steady and his choices never faltered.
When he was sure Ben DeLuca’s heart had stopped beating or his brain function would be seriously impacted by the loss of oxygen, Damian waited for the machines to reset once more. He unplugged his leads from the machine and replaced them with Ben’s again. He pulled the oxygen clamp from his index finger and slid it back over Ben’s. Damian pressed hard around the rubbery material so any evidence of his fingerprint inside would be gone or smudged with Ben’s and he replaced the breathing tube to the apparatus on Ben’s mouth. The man’s chest began to rise and fall again with the help of the machine, but Damian knew it was already too late.
The machines finally started beeping with their warnings. Flat lines showed across every vital sign.
No life recorded.
No heartbeat.
There was always a slight delay, but not much, before the machines at the front station would show the warnings as well. Damian had watched them over the last couple of days as he and Lily came and went, visiting the few people who had been caught in the crossfire of the Trentini home shooting.
How easily they overlooked a killer. Damian didn’t even care anymore. Being able to blend in meant he was just another face in the crowd. His job was so much easier because of others stupid mistakes.
Still unconcerned and calm, Damian buttoned his shirt back up, grabbed the clipboard and left the room. He didn’t close the door as he stepped outside and turned to walk back down the hallway in the same way he came. Keeping his gaze down on the unknown patient’s paperwork, Damian slipped outside the doors of the ICU, glancing back in just enough time to see nurses rush into Ben DeLuca’s hospital room.
Damian had carefully chosen his time to hit Ben DeLuca. With the time at five minutes after twelve in the afternoon, the hospital was just beginning its lunch rush. Staff worked to serve the patients outside of the unit while other nurses, doctors, and hospital employees made their way down to ground level where the cafeteria was located. Family members of patients in the large hospital swarmed the place with takeout as they came and went.
