Sold to the Don.

My shift ended at seven in the morning, and by the time I dragged myself up the porch steps of my father's house, I had been awake for twenty two hours. My feet hurt, my scrubs smelled of antiseptic and somebody else's blood, and the only thing I wanted in the entire world was a hot shower followed by my bed. The front door was open. It stood a few inches ajar, swinging a little whenever the morning breeze pushed at it, and my tired brain needed a full second to understand why that made my stomach drop. Dad never left the door open. Dad barely opened the curtains anymore, not since the calls started coming and the letters with red stamps began piling up on the kitchen counter. I pushed it with two fingers. "Dad?" Nobody answered, but I heard a wet, choking sound coming from the living room, and every bit of my training kicked in before fear could catch up. I dropped my bag and ran. My father was on the couch with his head tipped back and a dish towel pressed to his face. The towel had turned red. Blood ran from his nose into his gray stubble, and his left eye had already swollen half shut. Two men stood over him. One leaned against the mantel, scrolling through his phone as though he were waiting for a bus, while the other sat in Dad's recliner with his legs stretched out and a pistol resting on his knee. I stopped so fast my sneakers squeaked on the floorboards. The man in the recliner looked up. He was big, with a shaved head and a scar that ran from his ear to the corner of his mouth, and when his eyes landed on me they moved down my body in no hurry at all. I knew what he saw. My scrubs were a size too small because I hadn't bought new ones in two years, so the top stretched across my chest and the pants clung to the curve of my hips no matter how often I tugged at them. My dark hair had come loose from its bun hours ago and hung in tangles around my shoulders. I wanted to cross my arms over myself, but I refused to give him the satisfaction. "So this is her," he said. "Get the hell out of my house." My voice came out lower than I meant it to, though at least it held. "I'm calling the police." The man by the mantel laughed without looking up from his phone. "Stace," Dad croaked. He pulled the towel away, and I saw that his lip was split too. "Stacey, honey, please, just listen to them." "Listen to what?" I crossed to him anyway and tilted his chin toward the window so I could see his nose. Broken, almost certainly. "Who are these people? What did you do?" He started crying, and that was how I knew. If I was honest, I had known for months, ever since I found the betting slips stuffed inside his winter boots and he swore on Mom's grave that he'd quit. I paid off the first loan from my savings. I paid the second with the money I'd been putting away for my master's degree. After that I stopped asking, because asking meant hearing lies, and I was too exhausted to carry those on top of everything else. "How much?" I said. The scarred man answered for him. "Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, sweetheart. Owed to the Moretti family as of last Friday." The number hit me so hard I had to put a hand on the arm of the couch. I made forty-eight thousand a year working nights at Mercy General. I could work until I died and never see that kind of money in one place. "The house," I said quickly, turning to him. "Take the house. It has to be worth something." "The bank owns the house. Your father took a second mortgage in March." He tilted his head. "Kept that one quiet too, huh?" I looked down at Dad. He wouldn't meet my eyes. "Then what do you want?" I asked. "Look around. There's nothing left here." The man rose from the recliner and tucked the pistol into the back of his waistband. He was taller than I'd guessed, and he came close enough that I could smell cigarettes and expensive cologne. "There's you," he said. For a second the words made no sense. Then I noticed the paper on the coffee table, a single typed page with my father's signature scrawled across the bottom in shaky blue ink, and the room tilted. "No," I said. "They were going to kill me," Dad whispered. "They put a gun in my mouth, baby, I swear to God I had no choice." "You sold me?" I could barely hear myself. "You sold me to them?" "It's not like that. They promised you won't be hurt. They promised." I slapped him. I had never raised a hand to anyone in my life, not even the drunks who spat at me during Saturday night shifts, but my palm struck his cheek before I could stop it, and he took the blow without a sound, which somehow made it worse. Then I ran. I made it down the hallway and nearly reached the back door before an arm hooked around my waist and hauled me off my feet. I kicked and clawed and drove my elbow into something soft until I heard a grunt, and then the scarred man spun me around and shoved me against the wall so hard the air left my lungs. "Listen to me carefully," he said, his face inches from mine. "My name is Nico. I don't enjoy hurting women, but I enjoy disappointing my boss a hell of a lot less. You're getting in the car. If you run again, Paulie goes back into that living room and puts a bullet in your father's knee, and then he does the other one. You're a nurse, right? You know how long a man can bleed." I knew. I knew exactly how long. My heart hammered against my ribs, and I hated how badly my legs wanted to give out. Behind us, Dad was sobbing. He was a liar and a coward and the reason my life had fallen apart, but he was also the man who taught me to ride a bike and sat beside Mom's hospital bed for six weeks straight, and I could never let them hurt him. "Fine," I said. "I'll go." Nico smiled. "Smart girl." --- They took my phone before putting me in a black SUV parked two houses down, the kind of spot where my neighbors would never think to look twice. Nico sat beside me in the back while Paulie drove, and nobody spoke as the city slid past the window, first my neighborhood with its chain-link fences and peeling paint, then the highway, then the north shore, where the homes grew bigger and farther apart until they stopped looking like homes at all. I spent the drive running through every option I had, and there weren't many. I could try jumping out at a red light, but the child safety latch was on. I could scream, but nobody would hear me through the tinted glass. Or I could wait, learn what they wanted, and find a way out later. Waiting was the only plan that didn't end with Dad in a wheelchair or me in a ditch. The car turned through a set of iron gates and climbed a long drive lined with oaks. When the mansion came into view, my mouth went dry. It rose three stories of pale stone and tall windows, with guards on the front steps who made no effort to hide their rifles. Nico walked me inside with his hand wrapped around my upper arm. The entrance hall was all marble floors and a staircase that curved up out of sight, and our footsteps rang off the walls as he steered me down a corridor to a pair of dark wooden doors. "He'll see you now," Nico said, and knocked once. "Come in," a voice answered. Something about that voice made the hair on my arms rise. It was deep and quiet, with the faintest trace of an accent, and I had the strangest feeling I had heard it before, somewhere far away from marble floors and men with guns. Nico pushed me through and closed the door behind me. The study was enormous, lined with bookshelves and lit only by the gray morning coming through a wall of windows. A man stood with his back to me, looking out over the grounds with one hand in his pocket. He was tall and broad through the shoulders, dressed in a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a tattoo wound up his forearm before disappearing under the fabric. "Miss Hart," he said without turning. "Sit down." "I'd rather stand." He made a low sound that might have been a laugh. "You said that last time too." I frowned. "I don't know what you're talking about. I've never met you." He turned around. The first thing I saw was his face, all hard angles and dark stubble, with a straight nose and a mouth that seemed to have forgotten how to smile. The second thing was his eyes, gray and cool and fixed on me so intently that my skin prickled. Then my memory caught up with my vision, and my knees nearly buckled. Two years ago. Bay Four. Three in the morning on a Tuesday, the ER packed with crash victims, and a man walking in alone with his hand pressed to his side and blood soaking through his shirt. He refused to give me his name, and he refused to let me call the police. He sat on that gurney without making a sound while I dug a bullet out of him with trembling hands, and when I warned him he would die if he left before the surgeon saw him, he looked at me with those same gray eyes and asked me my name. I told him. By morning, he was gone. "You," I breathed. "Me," Luca Moretti agreed. He came around the desk with an easy, unhurried stride, and I backed up until my shoulders hit the door. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, close enough that I felt the warmth of his body through my thin scrubs. His gaze moved over my face and then lower, lingering on my mouth before it returned to my eyes. "You stitched me up and called me an i***t," he said. "Nobody had called me an i***t in fifteen years." "You were an i***t," I said, because apparently I had lost my mind. "You nearly bled out." Something flickered across his face, and for a moment I thought he might smile. Instead he reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, his fingertips grazing my cheek so lightly I barely felt them, and every nerve in my body went still. "Your father owes me four hundred and twelve thousand dollars," he said quietly. "But that isn't why you're here, Stacey." My mouth had gone dry. "Then why am I here?" Luca leaned in until his lips almost touched my ear, and his voice dropped so low it barely carried. "Because eleven people saw my face that night," he said. "Ten of them are dead, and the men who killed them just found out about you."