Chapter 2 - The St. Catherine Sanitarium and the RingI later learned that Dominic Rossi refused to wait three miserable minutes for an emergency medical team. He bypassed protocol entirely, ordering his heavily armed enforcers to haul my bleeding, unconscious body into the back of his armored town car and rush me directly to St. Catherine Medical Center—a private, heavily guarded facility where the doctors answered only to him.
While a team of top-tier trauma surgeons fought frantically to extract seven hollow-point bullets from my body and restart my failing heart, Dominic’s men identified the assassin within the hour.
Victor Costa. A rival capo from the Brooklyn docks looking to send a bloody message to the Rossi family.
Worse, word had already leaked through the criminal underworld that a low-level waitress had not only survived the initial ambush, but had deliberately taken the hits meant for the matriarch of the Rossi syndicate. I was no longer just an innocent civilian caught in the crossfire. By saving Isabella, I had ruined a meticulously planned assassination attempt and deeply humiliated one of the most violent men in New York.
“Then protect her,” Isabella demanded, standing in the sterile hospital corridor hours later, her voice shaking with righteous fury as she faced her son.
“For how long?” Dominic asked, his face carved from cold, unyielding granite, though his knuckles were bruised and blood-stained from where he had beaten a confession out of Costa’s scout.
“As long as necessary,” Isabella shot back, refusing to back down. “She took a bullet meant for my heart, Dominic. She belongs to us now.”
Inside the intensive care unit, I floated in a twilight zone of fever dreams and chemical numbness. Machines breathed for me, inflating my lungs with rhythmic, artificial precision while heart monitors beeped a slow, steady pulse.
Dominic stood outside my ICU room through the dead of night, staring through the reinforced glass window as if his intense gaze alone could keep me anchored to the living world.
Footsteps echoed softly down the linoleum corridor. Enzo, Dominic’s oldest and most trusted lieutenant, stepped up beside him, holding a thick, worn manila folder.
“Boss,” Enzo murmured quietly, holding out the file. “We ran a complete background check on her. Everything we could pull from public databases, employment history, and private records.”
Dominic took the folder, his dark eyes narrowing. He flipped open the cover, scanning the pages of my life—my mother’s medical charts in Cleveland, my employment applications, my tax returns, my landlord disputes, my student loan defaults. The documents detailed a life of quiet desperation, struggle, and exhaustion.
Except… something else caught Dominic’s eye. A small, encrypted digital printout tucked into the back pocket of the file, detailing information that went far beyond public records. Information regarding my extended family tree, an old restraining order from a violent ex-boyfriend five years ago, and confidential bank routing numbers.
Dominic stared at the page, a muscle ticking along his sharp jawline. This wasn't a dossier compiled in the three hours since the shooting. It was a file containing information Dominic had gathered about me long before that night. Before the gala. Before I was ever hired at the Aster Crown Hotel. Before I took those bullets into my spine.
Dominic slowly closed the folder, his expression darkening into an impenetrable mask. He handed it back to Enzo without a word.
“Get me a priest,” Dominic commanded softly.
Isabella, who had been sitting on a nearby waiting bench, stood up instantly, her eyes widening in profound shock. “Dominic… what on earth are you doing? She’s unconscious, she’s bleeding internally, and she doesn't even know who we are!”
“She shielded you with her life, Ma,” Dominic replied, his voice dropping into a register that brooked zero argument. “And she is in mortal danger because of our war. A ring on her finger is the only armor in this city that will keep her safe from Costa’s remaining dogs.”
He started walking toward my ICU room, holding a small velvet box containing a heavy, antique gold band encrusted with diamonds—a family heirloom meant for a Rossi bride.
But Enzo stepped forward swiftly, grabbing Dominic firmly by the forearm to block his path.
“Boss, listen to me,” Enzo urged, his voice tight with warning. “If she survives this—if she wakes up and discovers why you already had a deep-background file on her before she ever poured a glass of champagne—she will never, ever forgive you. She’ll know you were watching her.”
Dominic stopped dead in his tracks outside my door. For several agonizing seconds, he said nothing at all. The hum of the hospital ventilation system filled the quiet corridor.
Then, slowly, he turned his head and looked through the glass window at my pale, broken body hooked up to half a dozen life-support tubes. He thought about the secret file, about the deception, and about the dangerous web that had connected our lives long before our eyes ever met in the ballroom.
May you like
He answered Enzo with five chilling words that nobody would explain to me until much later, words that would turn my entire recovery into a waking nightmare:
“She was never supposed to know.”
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