Sold to the Don.

Chapter two

For a long moment I stood there with my back against the door and his words sinking into me, and the only thing I could hear was my own pulse.

"That's not funny," I finally said.

"I'm not a funny man." Luca stepped back and walked to his desk, where he picked up a thick brown folder and held it out to me. "Open it."

I wanted to throw it at his head. Instead I took it, because my hands needed something to do, and I flipped back the cover.

The first photo was of Dr. Raj Patel, the trauma surgeon who'd finally come down to Bay Four that night and finished closing the wound I had started. I remembered him grumbling about cowboys who walked into his ER with bullets in them. He died eight months ago when his car went off a bridge on Lake Shore Drive, and I had gone to his funeral and held his wife's hand while she cried.

The next photo was Janine, the charge nurse who covered for me during my breaks. She died of an overdose last winter, and everybody at Mercy whispered about it for weeks because Janine never even took aspirin.

Then Tommy from security. Then Gloria from admissions. Then the paramedic who had been restocking his rig in the bay when Luca walked in.

I turned the pages faster, and my vision blurred. A fall down a flight of stairs. A mugging gone wrong. A house fire. Ten faces I had passed in hallways and shared coffee with, and every one of them was gone.

"They were accidents," I whispered. "The police said they were accidents."

"The police say what they're paid to say." His voice was calm, which somehow made it worse. "The night you met me, I had been shot by a man named Enzo Vitale. He's dead now. His father, Salvatore, believes that something of mine went into that hospital with me and never came out, and he has spent two years making sure nobody who saw me that night can hide it from him."

"What thing?"

"That's my business."

"It became my business when you dragged me out of my father's house," I snapped, and slapped the folder down on his desk so hard the photos slid across the wood. "Those were my friends. Janine was going to be godmother to my kids someday. So don't you dare stand there and tell me it's your business."

He studied me for a second, and I had the strange impression that I had surprised him. Then he leaned back against the desk and folded his arms, which pulled the black shirt tight across his chest and drew my eyes, against every scrap of good sense I had left, to the muscle in his forearms and the dark ink curling up toward his elbow.

"A flash drive," he said. "Small and black, about the size of your thumb. It holds enough to put half the families in this city in prison, and it disappeared somewhere between Bay Four and the surgical floor."

I thought back. I had cut away his shirt and bagged his belongings the way I did for every patient, his wallet and keys and a phone with a cracked screen. I tried to picture anything else in that clear plastic bag, and nothing came.

"I never saw it," I said.

"I believe you. Salvatore won't." He nodded toward the scattered photos. "Gloria from admissions was the tenth, three weeks ago. You're the eleventh, and his men started asking about you on Friday."

The floor seemed to shift under me. "Friday," I repeated. "The same day my father's debt came due."

"Yes."

Understanding crawled up my spine, cold and ugly. "You bought it. You bought his debt from whoever he really owed so you'd have an excuse to drag me here."

"I bought his debt," Luca said evenly, "because a man who owes the Moretti family belongs to the Moretti family, and that includes his blood. It was the fastest way to put my name between you and a bullet." His gray eyes held mine. "Your father sold you to me, Stacey. Would you rather he sold you to them?"

I opened my mouth to argue, and nothing came out.

"Here's how this works," he went on. "Among the families, there are very few rules left, but one still matters. Nobody touches a Don's wife. Not unless they want every crew in the city burning their houses to the ground. Salvatore is a lot of things, but he isn't stupid."

The word *wife* landed in my chest and stayed there.

"No," I said. "Absolutely not. I'm not marrying you."

"Saturday. A small ceremony here at the house."

"Are you out of your f*****g mind? I don't even know you!"

"You've had your hands inside me," he said dryly. "That's further than most of my dates get."

Heat rushed into my face, and I hated him for it. "You can't force someone to marry you. That's not even legal."

"Then walk out." He gestured toward the door. "Nobody will stop you. Go home, go back to Mercy, and see how long it takes before you have an accident on the stairs."

I looked at the door. I looked at Janine's smiling face on the desk. I thought about Dad sitting alone in that house with his broken nose, and how easy it would be for a man like Salvatore Vitale to use him to get to me.

My hands were trembling, so I curled them into fists.

"If I do this," I said slowly, "my father gets protection. Real protection, men watching his house day and night. And I keep my job."

"Your father, yes. The job, no."

"Then no deal."

His jaw tightened. "You'd be dead within a week of going back."

"Then figure it out," I shot back. "You're the big scary Don, aren't you? I spent six years earning that job, and I'm not giving it up because some old man wants a flash drive I never saw."

The silence that followed stretched so long I thought he might call Nico in to drag me away. Instead, the corner of his mouth lifted, just barely, and it changed his whole face.

"Two shifts a week," he said. "With my men inside the hospital. That's my final offer."

"Three."

"Two, Stacey, or I lock the gates and you never see that hospital again."

I swallowed hard. "Fine. Two."

"Good." He pushed off the desk and pressed a button on his phone. "Then welcome home, Miss Hart."

The woman who came to collect me was not a maid.

She swept into the study wearing a cream dress that hugged every curve she had, with glossy black hair falling past her shoulders and red lipstick so perfect it looked painted on. She was maybe a few years older than me and one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, and when her dark eyes slid over my wrinkled scrubs and tangled hair, her smile never wavered, though something cold moved behind it.

"So this is the nurse," she said. "I'm Sienna, Luca's cousin. Come, I'll show you to your room."

She chatted the whole way up the curving staircase, pointing out paintings and telling me which rooms I was never to enter, and her voice stayed sweet as syrup the entire time. When she opened a door at the end of the third-floor hall, she stepped aside to let me in.

The room was bigger than my father's whole house. A huge bed sat against one wall, piled with cream pillows, and tall windows looked out over the gardens and the gate beyond.

"Luca has never brought a woman home before," Sienna said from the doorway. "Not one. You must be very special." She tilted her head. "Or very useful. With him, it's hard to tell the difference."

She closed the door before I could answer.

I stood alone in the middle of that beautiful room, and finally, after twenty four hours awake and a morning that had ripped my life apart, my legs gave out. I sank onto the edge of the bed and pressed my hands over my face, and I let myself cry for Janine and Dr. Patel and Tommy, for my father, and for the girl who had walked up those porch steps this morning thinking the worst thing waiting for her was an empty fridge.

When the tears finally stopped, I wiped my face and caught my reflection in the mirror across the room. My eyes were swollen, my curls were a disaster, and my scrubs clung to my hips and breasts in a way that made me think about how Luca's gaze had dropped to my mouth. I shoved that thought away fast.

I needed a shower. I needed sleep. Most of all, I needed a plan.

I stood and turned toward the bathroom, and that was when I saw the envelope on my pillow.

It was plain and white, and it had not been there when I walked in. My heart started pounding as I picked it up and slid out what was inside.

It was a photograph of me, sitting on the edge of this bed with my face in my hands, crying.

It had been taken from inside this room, no more than ten minutes ago.

On the back, someone had written four words in neat black ink.

Ten down. One left.