Page 105 of Deathless & Divided

Going to the mattresses, said another.

Lily felt sick.

Barely anyone talked to Lily and Damian as they stayed close together in a corner while they waited on news. Some had already come. News that wasn’t good and cut as deeply as it could get. Damian seemed calm on the outside, but Lily had to wonder if it was nothing more than a lie. The man wore too many masks for her to tell.

Lea Rossi died thirty minutes after being admitted into an OR for surgery. She’d lost far too much blood and by the time the paramedics reached the scene, there was very little they could do. The cops, with their barricades and questions, refused to let anyone leave the confines of the Trentini estate. The Rossi family received the news about their daughter while police hounded them with questions.

That was how they found out Lea died.

Lily suppressed a shudder, remembering the sound of Cara’s cries. It was not an easy thing to hear, but it was even worse to learn the news with people and cops surrounding you. There was no privacy for the family, no seclusion for their hearts to break.

No, their pain simply shattered over wet asphalt while guests and police looked on.

The black suburban hadn’t been found. Cops lost the trail as far as Lily understood.

“I’m sorry,” Lily told Damian for what felt like the hundredth time.

Damian squeezed her knee tightly. “Don’t be.”

“But—”

His blue eyes burned into hers with not a sign of wetness behind the irises.

“Don’t be,” Damian repeated. “I chose this.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Damian walked through the quiet ICU with a smooth stride and his head down. Snatching the white lab coat off the back of a nurse’s chair while the guy was distracted by a pretty face had been easy enough. It appeared like Damian’s attention was thoroughly engrossed by the information on the clipboard he’d stolen from a station outside of the ICU, but actually, he was surveying the people around him.

Like always, barely anyone noticed him as he strolled through the hospital’s unit with his white lab coat, dark slacks, and the stethoscope slung carelessly around his neck as any good doctor would do. Between work, patients, and visitors, the nurses on staff were kept busy and constantly moving from one thing to the next. They didn’t have time to question the unknown doctor on the floor who could be there simply by request of another doctor or patient’s family.

Ben, being a high ranking member in the Outfit, had been appointed a guard by Terrance’s request, but Damian had watched that man, too. He had a habit of running down to the cafeteria to grab a bite to eat at lunch and then he was relieved by another guard around supper. He was rarely gone more than ten, fifteen minutes at the most.

But it was enough time.

The drawn blinds on room 6B gave a bit of privacy as Damian stepped inside and closed the door. He locked the door even though he didn’t believe someone would interrupt his time. Damian didn’t bother to flick the lights on in the room as he glanced around at the beeping machines showing life and making their usual noise. The steady hiss of oxygen and the pump of the ventilator echoed in the space.

Ben DeLuca laid beneath stark white sheets, tucked safely in their confines. The man’s eyes were shut and he stayed prone on the bed as Damian crossed the space to get a better look at him. A tube inserted through Ben’s throat was attached to the ventilator, keeping him breathing and alive.

For now.

Comatose.

Well, as long as the doctors planned to keep him that way, anyway. The three bullets that the man took shattered a vertebra, tore a bad hole through Ben’s right lung, and the third lodged just above his temple. He would likely never walk again, be paralyzed from the shoulders up, and life wouldn’t be what it once had been for the DeLuca king.

But he was alive.

The coma had been nothing more than a medical decision designed to give Ben’s older body a chance to recover more without pain, emotional distress, and distractions. The ventilator had been needed to support Ben’s damaged lungs. According to Dino and the paperwork Ben’s wife Carmela received in order to continue on with the medically induced coma, Ben would have a better chance of long term recovery—as best that could be expected—if they went this route.

That couldn’t happen at all.

Lily DeLuca needed to be safe in all aspects.

Ben was a problem when it came to that. Hell, the man was a problem because he simply decided he didn’t like Damian. Even from a hospital bed, the man could cause problems. The power of a frail, manipulative man should never be underestimated.

Especially once everything was found out. Lily would always be safe. That didn’t make Damian any less pissed.

Every single time he thought about the eight bullet holes in the back of Lily’s Maserati, his rage boiled, threatening to take him under with the poisoned heat. Too close. That had been far too close.