Sold To The Mafia's Boss

Chapter Seventeen: Giovanni Attacked

Carmela's POV

I told the staff I'd handle dinner myself that evening. Giovanni had been picking at broth for two days, and that morning he'd finally asked for something with actual flavor to it — nothing dramatic, just a request, the first ordinary thing he'd wanted since the surgery. I wanted to be the one to give it to him.

I chose something simple. Chicken, rosemary, the kind of broth that actually tasted like something instead of hospital food dressed up in a bowl. The kitchen was warm, quiet except for the low simmer of the pot, and I stood over it stirring slowly, watching steam curl up toward the window.

I left him resting when I came down. His eyes were already heavy when I kissed his forehead and told him I'd be back soon, and he'd murmured something back that trailed off before he finished the sentence, already halfway into sleep.

I didn't think anything of it. He needed the rest. I was glad, honestly, that his body was finally letting him have it.

I was gone perhaps twenty minutes, maybe less. Long enough for the broth to finish, long enough to ladle it carefully into a bowl and carry it up the stairs myself instead of sending a tray. I remember thinking, climbing those stairs, that this was the calmest I'd felt in days.

The suite door was closed when I reached it. I balanced the bowl against my hip and pushed it open with my shoulder, already smiling, already imagining his face when he saw I'd made it myself.

The smile didn't survive past the doorway.

Giovanni lay exactly as I'd left him, propped against the pillows, eyes closed — except his breathing had changed. Too slow. Too shallow. A faint sheen of sweat had broken out along his hairline, though the room was cool, and his skin had taken on a grayish undertone that hadn't been there twenty minutes earlier.

The bowl slipped from my hands. I didn't hear it break.

"Giovanni." I was at his side before I'd finished saying his name, my hands finding his face, his shoulders, shaking him gently, then less gently. "Giovanni, wake up."

He didn't stir. His head lolled slightly beneath my hands, unresponsive in a way sleep had never made him before.

I don't remember deciding to scream for help. I just remember the sound tearing out of me, raw and animal, loud enough that I heard footsteps running from two rooms away before I'd even finished.

The doctor reached the room within a minute — he'd been staying in the guest wing since the shooting, close enough to respond fast, and even so, he arrived to find me already pressing my fingers uselessly against Giovanni's wrist, searching for a pulse I didn't know how to properly find.

He pushed past me without apology, two fingers finding the same spot instantly, his expression shifting from professional calm into something sharper within seconds.

"How long has he been like this?"

"I don't know. I was gone — twenty minutes, maybe less—"

"His pressure's crashing." He was already moving, pulling his bag open, retrieving a small kit I didn't recognize. "Someone had poisoned him. This isn't natural, and it isn't the medication I prescribed."

The words landed slowly, then all at once. Someone. Not an accident. Not a complication. Someone had walked into this room while I was downstairs stirring a pot of soup, and done something to him.

"Call the hospital," the doctor said, not looking up, his hands working fast and precise even as his voice stayed clipped with urgency. "Now. We don't have time to wait and see."

Everything after that blurred into pieces I could never fully put back in order. Men appeared in the doorway. A stretcher. Giovanni's arm slipping loose over the side of it as they lifted him, his head tilting toward me like it was searching for me, even unconscious.

I climbed into the car after him. No one stopped me this time.

His hand, when I found it, had already gone cold — not cold like death, I told myself, just cold like fear, like shock, like a body fighting something it shouldn't have to fight. I held it the entire ride, my thumb pressed against his wrist the way the doctor had shown me, feeling the small, stubborn flutter of his pulse every few seconds, needing the reassurance more than he needed me to have it.

"Stay with me," I said, over and over, quiet enough that only he could have heard it, if he could hear anything at all. "Please" Stay with me."

The hospital took him from me within seconds of arriving — doors swinging open, hands reaching for the stretcher, voices calling numbers and instructions I didn't understand. I was left standing in a corridor with nothing in my hands anymore, not even his.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that a nurse eventually brought me a blanket I didn't ask for. Long enough that the light outside the corridor windows shifted from afternoon into evening without my noticing.

When the surgeon finally found me, his mask still hanging loose around his neck, I stood so fast I nearly lost my balance.

"We found a fast-acting sedative in his system," he said, "combined with something meant to slow his heart. If it had gone untreated much longer, it likely would have stopped."

"But he's alive." I needed to hear the words directly, not the careful, clinical version he'd wrapped them in.

"He's alive. We're operating now to clear it from his system and stabilize him. I won't lie to you — the next few hours will tell us a great deal."

"Do whatever you need to do." My voice didn't shake, though everything else in me did. "Just bring him back to me."

The surgery took hours. I sat outside that door the entire time, replaying the twenty minutes over and over — the broth, the stairs, the smile I'd been wearing when I pushed the door open. Twenty minutes. That was all it had taken for someone to walk into that room and try to take him from me.

When the surgeon finally emerged again, hours later, exhaustion carved deep into his face, he delivered two words that let me breathe for the first time since I'd found him.

"He's stable."

I sat back down slowly, my legs no longer entirely trustworthy beneath me, and let the relief move through me in slow waves. But underneath it, something colder settled in and refused to leave.

Whoever had done this hadn't come through a window, or scaled a wall, or fought past a single guard. They had walked calmly into a house full of armed men, into a room they knew would be empty at exactly the right window of time, and left just as quietly as they'd come.

Someone inside this house had tried to kill him. Someone with easy access, someone who knew exactly when the room would be empty and for how long — which meant someone who'd been watching us closely enough to know my routine as well as I knew it myself. And I still had no idea who.