“Not long. The doctor has been really busy seeing to those injured in the fire.”
“And the little girl I came in with?” I asked.
They’d split up me and Tatiana when the ambulance had arrived at the hospital. A fucking beam had fallen on me just as I’d reached the door of the burning building last night and knocked me out for hours. An entire night. Hours I couldn’t afford to lose.
“She’s being treated for smoke inhalation. She’s doing just fine.” The nurse gave me an encouraging smile and reached for the iodine-soaked gauze she was using to clean my burns.
They were superficial at best. Some on my hands and arms. The very minimum you could expect if you went into a building where burning beams fell from the sky.
I’d found Tatiana hiding in a cupboard in the kitchen.
I’d come damn near to not finding her at all. A thought that didn’t bear thinking about. She’d run out of her room and hidden before the nurses went to check on her.
She’d already been unconscious from the smoke in the air when I’d found her. Those burning moments, carrying her out of the building, shoving and pushing the fallen beams away from us, had taken me back in time to my years in the military. Then the ceiling had fallen, and it had been lights out. There was another patient from the institute in the bed next to me, and he’d told me that Katarina had gotten into a car. Blackwood’s car.
My blood burned at the thought of her being with him. Where the hell had he taken her? I didn’t have my personal effects. The damn nurses had taken all of them from me when I’d come into the hospital with Tatiana, and they’d insisted on treating the burns on my hands and arms.
Now I sat in a paper gown without my phone or the ability to call Giada or check my tracking app.
Thank fuck I’d given Katarina the dog tags. The tracker inside was linked to an app on my phone. I could sign into the program from somewhere else, but the fastest thing would be to get my own phone back. I had exactly one thing in my possession that I was sentimental about, and that was those tags, hence the tracker. I could only be grateful I had a way to find Katarina quickly, once I got out of here.
The nurse finally finished cleaning the burns. I watched men in cop uniforms passing up and down the hallway. The detectives were back, the ones who’d left just before the fire, and a hell of a lot more officers. I supposed that the case was turning into something a lot more involved. A disappearance, a suicide, and now a fire.
Suspicious. I needed to get out of here before they decided to question me, too. I had to find Katarina.
What felt like an hour later saw the nurse sticking fresh bandages over my wounds and stepping back.
“Are we done? I need my stuff back—my clothes and my phone.”
She nodded, and her eyes darted to the curtain guiltily.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Lucciano, or should I say Father? I have them here,” a male voice said from the gap in the curtain.
I held the nurse’s eye for a long moment. She’d been stalling me.Perfect.
Standing in that gap was the same detective who had been at Hallow Hall before, holding my priest’s robes and phone.
“I would love to have a chat, too, while we’re here,” he said with a smile.
Fuck me.
“So,tell me again why you were at Hallow Hall? Since you aren’t actually affiliated with the Church?” Detective Margoni was a persistent fucker, I’d give him that.
I shrugged. “Hallow Hall Institute has no affiliation with the Church either, just a lot of old men who liked to cosplay as priests. I was following their dress code.”
Margoni frowned at me, and my fraying patience snapped.
“Listen, Detective, I appreciate your zeal, it’s very impressive, but you need to look where the real problems are, like why has a place like this been running for as long as it has right here in Torino? Why hasn’t it been investigated before?”
“It’s registered as a private hospital,” Margoni pointed out.
“A private hospital that doesn’t appear to make any money and people barely pay any fees to attend? Yeah, that sounds aboveboard.”
Margoni sighed. “Do you know how stretched thin we are in the city? If there are no complaints about a place, then why would we go and poke into it?”
“Don’t ask me to explain your ineptitude. Now, if you’re finished asking me to do your job for you, I need to get going.”
Margoni shook his head. “I don’t think so.”