The Don’s Deadly Cure

Chapter 3- NADIA

Nadia's POV

The silence that followed the clatter of the gun was deafening.

I stared at the man slumped against my legs. His weight was staggering, a literal deadweight of muscle and expensive wool. My brain, the part of me trained for high-stakes precision, was screaming at me to move. My heart, the part of me still trapped in a six-year-old’s nightmare, wanted to bolt for the door and never look back.

Move, Nadia. Or he dies on your floor.

I shoved the fear into a small, dark box in my mind and locked it. I was no longer a terrified woman in a hotel room; I was a surgeon.

"God help me," I whispered, grabbing his shoulders and heaving.

It took every ounce of strength I possessed to drag him toward the center of the room. I needed light. I needed space. I pushed the coffee table aside, sending a stack of medical journals flying, and rolled him onto his back.

His face was even more haunting up close. Even in the throes of hemorrhagic shock, he possessed a brutal, dark beauty. But I couldn't focus on his jawline or the way his dark lashes fanned against his pale skin. I had to focus on the hole in his side.

I ripped his silk shirt open, the buttons pinging off the marble floor like tiny bullets.

The wound was ugly. It was a through-and-through, meaning the bullet had entered and exited, but it had nicked an artery on the way. Blood was pulsing out in time with his weakening heart. As a neurosurgeon, I was used to the microscopic, the thin, silver threads of nerves and the steady rhythm of a brain pulse. This was raw. This was primal.

"Okay. Okay, Nadia. Think."

I ran to the bathroom, grabbing every clean white towel the Palazzo Parigi provided. I piled them on the wound, pressing down with my full body weight. He let out a low, guttural groan, his hand twitching near the gun I’d kicked under the sofa.

"Stay with me," I commanded, my voice snapping into the sharp tone I used with my residents. "You told me not to call the police. If you want to live, you stay awake."

Suddenly, a sound from the hallway made my blood turn to ice.

Heavy footsteps. More than one person.

They were muffled by the thick hallway carpet, but I heard them stop. Right outside my door. My breath hitched. I looked at the man on the floor, then at the heavy oak door. If his enemies were looking for him, a trail of blood surely led straight to Suite 412.

Click.

The sound of a door handle being tried.

I stayed frozen, my hands red and buried in the towels against his ribs. I didn't breathe. I didn't move. I watched the golden handle of my door jiggle, the only thing separating me from men who clearly didn't care about medical ethics.

"Suite 412 is locked," a low, gravelly voice whispered in Italian from the other side of the wood. "Check the service stairs. He couldn't have gone far with that wound."

I waited until the footsteps faded into the distance. My forehead was damp with sweat, stinging my eyes. I wasn't just performing an illegal surgery; I was hiding a fugitive.

I stood up, my legs shaking, and grabbed my professional travel kit. As a neurosurgeon traveling for a conference, I always carried a basic emergency kit, scalpels, sutures, and a small vial of lidocaine. It wasn't an operating room, but it was all he had.

I doused my hands in high-proof vodka from the minibar, the only disinfectant I had in abundance, and knelt back down. I felt the familiar weight of the scalpel in my hand, and for a moment, the room disappeared. There was only the patient, the wound, and the need to fix what was broken.

"This is going to hurt," I whispered to his unconscious form.

I injected the lidocaine around the wound site, my fingers steady despite the chaos in my chest. As I began to debride the jagged edges of the entry wound, his eyes snapped open.

He didn't scream. He didn't even flinch. He just reached up and gripped my bicep with a strength that shouldn't have been possible for a dying man. I finally saw them up close—his eyes. One was a piercing, icy blue; the other, a deep, mossy green. Complete heterochromia. They burned with a feverish intensity.

"Who..." he coughed, a thin trail of blood staining his teeth. "Who are you?"

"I'm the woman saving your life," I snapped, refusing to look away from the task at hand. "Now be quiet and let me work. If you move, I hit the artery, and you’re a corpse."

He stared at me for a long, agonizing second, his fingers digging into my skin. Then, slowly, his grip loosened. A strange look crossed his face, not fear, but a dark, predatory curiosity.

"Nadia," he breathed.

My heart stopped. My needle slipped, grazing his skin. "How do you know my name?"

He didn't answer. His eyes closed again, but the corner of his mouth quirked up in a way that terrified me more than the gun ever could.

He hadn't just stumbled into my room by accident. He knew exactly whose door he was knocking on.