Holding onto the rails of her bed, I stared at her. She looked pale. I’d taken the liberty of washing her face, her neck, and even her hair, as it had been covered in vomit. I had a sneaking suspicion that when she woke up, she was going to want to bathe.
Turning from the end of the bed, I moved toward her side, and I didn’t take the seat beside the bed but actually sat on topof it. I reached for her hand and held onto it, wanting to offer her comfort. There was no real life to her at the moment. She was out cold. The effects of the poison were out of her system, and the doctor said he’d be providing her with fluids to remove it as quickly as possible.
I wonder if Roberto intended his daughter to suffer like this.
“I won’t let anything like this happen to you again,” I said. “I promise you. No one is going to be able to touch you.”
Alba had declared her loyalty to me.
The women she had helped over the years told me she was not like the others, but I felt they were attempting to romanticize it. They clearly hadn’t. I’d seen the evidence for myself, how different Alba was from the rest of her family.
“I’ve got you,” I said.
“She’s going to be all right now.”
I turned to Doctor Hope. That was his name. He and I went way back. He’d been maimed for trying to protect my parents, and I did everything in my power to keep him safe. He did everything in his power to keep me alive. We were able to make this work.
“You and I both know there’s something you need to do,” Doctor Hope said.
“I don’t want to leave her.”
“She’s in good hands, or in as good a set of hands as she is going to get. Trust me with her. She’s not going to wake up for another few hours. You’ve got time to do whatever you need to do,” Doctor Hope said. “If I feel her situation declining, I will call you.”
The temptation was there. I couldn’t deny it. I wanted to protect her, and when she was ready to wake up, I didn’t want to have to fucking leave.
Lifting her hand up to my mouth, I pressed a kiss to the back of it. “I will be back before you even realize I’m gone.”
There was no response. Just the beeping of machines to let me know she was okay.
I got to my feet and looked toward Doctor Hope. “You’ve got your eye on her?”
“Always, Odin. You know this.”
I nodded, but it still didn’t feel good to be walking away. It was the last thing I wanted to do. However, if I did what I needed, then I didn’t have to leave Alba.
I forced myself to walk out of that room, and leaving the hospital was a blur. Climbing into my car was the same, and driving the distance to the abandoned warehouse didn’t seem to register in my brain, as I kept reliving that moment where she seemed to be unsteady on her feet, and then the way she just fell. It was quick, I know it was, because I saw it, but I was there. I reacted so quickly in order to save her.
Arriving at the warehouse, I saw several of my guards outside, and I nodded to them. They parted the way for me to walk into the warehouse, where I heard the screaming. I expected to see some torture, only none of my men were touching the man responsible for hurting my wife. He was held in place, unable to move, and for a second, I watched.
I looked at the man who could have taken my wife from me. It had been a long time since I had any feelings. I was used to anger, rage, my wrath being my constant companion that drove me to where I was today. I was used to those feelings.
I hadn’t felt this fear in over twelve years, when my sister was taken, and then with what happened next in the course of my life—losing my dogs, my home, my family, all of it. To many, it would have broken a man, and there was a part of me that felt it must have. Only, it didn’t break me, it drove me to what I was about to do.
I reached out and forced the man to look at me, grabbing his face and tightening my hands on him, to make sure he saw me. The moment he looked at me, I saw the fear in his eyes. He thought he had done the job.
“You put my wife in the hospital,” I said. “And for that, you are going to pay, but first, there are parts of you that are going to send a message.”
I pulled open his shirt, and there, at the side of his body, was the ink that declared him a man of the Serra Mafia. It was subtle, a small dove with a crown. This is what all Serra men and women had. The moment they declared themselves part of the Serra Mafia and became nothing more than their pets.
Anger raced through me, and I reached in my jacket and grabbed my knife. A knife that had been used by one of Serra’s men to kill me. The man had failed, and with it, I had taken my first kill. Every other kill since then had been because of this, and this was the knife I saved and honed in order to use on Serra members.
I take this moment to peel that flesh from the man, and my guards have no choice but to hold him steady, as I take that piece of flesh marked as Serra, because that was the only piece that was going back to them.
Chapter Five
Alba
The moment I opened my eyes, I knew something bad had happened. I didn’t feel right. My body ached in a way it never had before. My mouth tasted like shit. Or at least, what I imagine shit would taste like.