Dante scowled. "I didn't say he—"
Before he could finish, Gabriella swung around in his arms and clamped her hand down over his mouth. Her expression was stern, that 'say another word and I'll cut you' kind of glare that silenced him.
Matteo walked around to the passenger side of the car as Genna unlocked the doors. Dante glanced over at them, still scowling, not saying a word about it, before he looked back at Gabriella.
"Good boy," she whispered, removing her hand from his mouth to kiss him.
"You're lucky I love you," he said, "because I would've bit your hand off if I didn't."
Gabriella laughed, her gaze flickering past him, over his shoulder. There was a glint in her eye as her expression slowly fell. It happened in slow motion, the melting of ice, washing away the elation, the drip-drop of fear settling in, trickling through her. Mere seconds passed, but to Dante, the moment was a lifetime. A lifetime, because he'd seen that look before. He'd seen that look before many times, but he'd only caused it once. The spinning of a film reel, a lifetime of memories playing through someone's mind, a life that could be gone in the blink of an eye.
Terror took over every bit of Gabriella, her mouth dropping open and a lone word slipping out. "Fuck."
Fuck.
Heart hammering hard against his rib cage, Dante turned, every inch of him rigid as fear coated his insides, the blood in his veins ice cold. Ten feet separated him from a gun. It aimed right at his chest, clutched in the unsteady hand of a livid man. Civello. A finger touched the trigger, eager to shoot, as a set of unnerved eyes darted around at the group, like maybe he was thinking twice about doing it, second-guessing this decision. The guy was alone and severely outnumbered. Dante was unarmed, but the guy had to know he wouldn't get far. Tweedle-Whatever wasn't a genius, but he couldn't be that stupid.
Could he?
Don't do it. Dante stared at him. Don't fucking do it.
Seconds passed, strained seconds. Nobody else seemed to notice, and Dante couldn't get his goddamn voice to work to warn anyone. He was a deer frozen in a blinding beam of light until Civello shifted, making his decision. Shit.
The guy frantically bounced from person to person before his gaze settled on Dante's car. Genna opened the driver's side door, oblivious, still laughing. Ding ding. Anger turned to shock before succumbing to intense rage. The man's nostril's flared, the gun aiming past Dante at the noticeably pregnant Genevieve Galante.
Grabbing Gabriella, Dante yanked her out of the line of fire, dragging her away from the curb, hoping she was smart enough to get out of there. "Go!"
Gabriella ran.
"Gun!" someone screamed, chaos ensuing, the neighborhood erupting in mayhem. Dante sprinted for the car, grabbing Genna just as gunfire cut through the air, a stream of bullets raining down on them. Pain and panic; fear and fury. It swarmed him, burning him from the inside, as he dragged his sister to the sidewalk, shielding her body with his own.
Dante watched, his vision blurry, as Gavin pulled out a gun and started unloading on the son of a bitch.
"It's okay," Dante said. "Just stay down."
"Matty," Genna cried, trying to wiggle free. "Where's Matty?"
"Jesus Christ, Genna, stop," Dante growled. "Wait a goddamn second."
A second was all she gave him. The gunfire came to an abrupt stop and Genna shoved against him. Dante loosened his hold, giving her enough room to slip away, hauling herself to her feet. "Matty?"
"I'm fine," Matteo said, standing up from beside the car. Genna threw herself at him, crying, knocking him back down.
Dante climbed to his feet, dazed, trying to assess the situation but everything was a blur. Adrenaline rushed through him, so furious his stomach churned, his chest burning with every breath forced into his lungs. People still ran. Others still screamed. His head grew fuzzy. He couldn't think.
He needed to think.
Civello lay on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. Gavin paced around, fidgeting, his gun tucked back away, his skin ashen.
"Genna?" Matteo's voice was frantic. "Genna, baby, there's blood on you."
"What?" Genna asked. "I'm not, I mean…"
Dante blinked rapidly, bile burning his throat, engulfing his chest. He saw it, the smear of blood on her arm, transferred from her black shirt. Matteo tugged at her clothes, searching for injuries.
"I'm fine," Genna insisted, looking down. "I, uh… oh shit, I think my water might've broke."
"The blood," Matteo said, stressing the word. "Where's the blood coming from?"
"I don't know." She raised her hands. "I don't think it's mine."
"Dante…" Gabriella's calm voice cut through as she carefully approached, grasping his arm. "Dante, I need you to sit down."
Dante turned, holding her gaze for a moment, seeing a familiar concern that greeted him every day for weeks. Nurse Russo. He blinked a few times before looking down, noticing the dark spot spreading over the blue shirt along the side of his chest. He didn't feel it so much yet, the flood of adrenaline diluting the pain, but knowledge clicked in a hell of a lot quicker. Reaching up, he pressed his hand to the spot, grimacing, blood streaking his fingertips. "I think it's mine."
Gabriella tugged on him, trying to lead him to the building, but the first step he took made his head swim. Woozy. He swayed, vision fading, and grabbed ahold of the car to steady himself.
"I…" Dante hesitated. "I need to sit down."
He leaned back against the car and slid down to the sidewalk, blood gushing from the wound when he moved, stabbing pain raiding from it.
He grasped the spot, wincing.
"I need something!" Gabriella shouted. "A towel or a rag or a shirt, something."
Gavin stepped over, still sickeningly pale, pulling off his suit coat. Gabriella snatched it from him, tearing Dante's hands away from the wound to press the fabric against it.
"Hold this right here," Gabriella ordered, looking at Gavin. "Press hard. I need to run up to the apartment and grab some stuff."
Gavin obliged, and Gabriella started to leave, but Dante grabbed her arm, stopping her. "Wait…"
"We don't have time to wait," she said. "The quicker we get your bleeding stopped, the better."
"His gun." Dante motioned to the pistol tucked in Gavin's waistband. "Get rid of it."
"That's not important right now," Gavin muttered.
"The hell it isn't," Dante said. "It needs gone before the police come."
Gavin started to argue when Gabriella snatched it out of his waistband, concealing it in her coat as she ran inside. Once she was gone, Gavin shook his head. "Your dumb ass is sitting here bleeding and you're more worried about me going to jail? Who's the sentimental bitch now?"
Dante laughed, wincing as it caused pain to tear through him. "Mandatory minimums. Having that gun when they show up will get you an automatic three and a half years at Rikers."
"Ouch."
"Tell me about it," Dante muttered, looking down at his chest. "I can't believe this happened. Someone shot me."
"Yeah, well, we knew it was inevitable."
"You aren't laughing, though."
"Of course I'm not laughing."
"You said you would. You said you'd stand back and laugh when it finally happened."
"You know I didn't mean that."
Gabriella ran back out of the building, carrying an armful of supplies, and dropped them on the sidewalk beside Dante, shoving Gavin away so she could get to work.
"I love you," Dante said quietly.
Her eyes flickered to him with surprise. "I love you, too."
He smiled slightly, his vision blurry. "Don't let me die alone in the dark, Gabby."
Gabby. He'd never called her that before, even though she'd asked him to.
"You're not dying, Dante," she said, "nor are you alone. Nor is it even dark right now. You're going to be just fine."
"Good," Dante said, closing his eyes and grimacing as she poked and prodded. "Because if I die, I really think Gavin might cry."
br />
"Fuck you," Gavin muttered, standing close enough to hear.
Sirens blared in the distance. EMS, maybe. Police, most likely. A shooting in broad daylight tended to ignite a full response. Medics surrounded Dante within minutes, putting him on a stretcher while officers fired questions his way that he had no desire to answer.
As Dante was loaded into the back of an ambulance, he heard his sister's voice. His eyes drifted to where she stood along the curb, flanked by Matteo and Gavin, police surrounding them, asking the same questions they'd asked Dante.
"Wait, it wasn't you?" Genna asked, her voice high-pitched, forced, as she addressed a uniformed officer. "I swear I thought it was. You didn't kill that guy? You sure?"
Man, she was a terrible liar.
She smiled at Dante, but it didn't last long. Her expression shifted as she clutched her stomach, doubling over in pain. She tried to straighten back up, but the second she did, her eyes rolled back and she dropped.
Matteo caught her before she hit the sidewalk.
"Genna?" Dante tried to climb off of the stretcher, but the IVs in his arms tethered him in place, tugging when he moved. Before he could yank them out, medics restrained him, pinning him against the stretcher. "You can't hold me. I know my rights!"
"Go, Dante," Gabriella begged from outside the ambulance. Not allowed to ride along, officers said, not until she'd answered their questions. Bullshit. Matteo knelt beside Genna as medics rushed to her side. "I'll meet you at the hospital."
"But—"
"I swear to God, Dante Galante, if you don't go to the hospital this time, I will end you myself. If the blood loss doesn't do it, I will."
He intended to keep arguing, but his chest burned, his head pounded, and he wanted more than anything to actually survive, so he let them take him to the hospital.
He let them triage him.
He let them assess his wound before stitching him up and pumping him full of somebody else's blood and sending him to a recovery room. No surgery needed. Fractured a rib, but hell, he'd fractured a few of those before. That was nothing new.
Give them a day, they told him, so he gave them an hour... an hour before he was sure he wasn't going to die if he skipped out.
He refused further treatment, signing their 'I'm a dumbass but promise not to sue you for it' release form before roaming the hospital, searching for Gabriella. She'd promised to meet him there, so he had no doubt she'd be around somewhere.
He spotted her after a few minutes down in the cafeteria, ordering coffee, and staggered up to her. "Can I get one of those, too?"
Gabriella looked at him with shock. "What are you doing?"
"Looking for you."
"I'm right here," she said. "Why aren't you in a bed?"
"I got released."
"Against medical advice?"
"Maybe."
She rolled her eyes, muttering under her breath as she gathered the coffees—three of them. "Idiot, I swear to God. You're seriously going to die one of these times, and what am I supposed to do then?"
Dante pulled her into his arms, damn near knocking the coffee cups out of her hands. He held her, breathing her in. Vanilla. The hospital stench surrounded them, but she smelled nothing like it. She was the calm in his storm. "Can we just get out of here?"
"Not yet. Your sister…"
"What about her?"
"She's having the baby."
Chapter Twenty-Five
You are who you choose to be.
Johnny Amaro had told Matty that once. He never forgot it. He'd been living in New Jersey, going by the last name Brazzi, when his father asked him to move back to New York. For a decade, Matty had waited for that moment, had agonized over if his father would ever welcome him back home. But Matty had just turned eighteen at the time and had been accepted to Princeton, and he'd already given up on them being a family.
And if he were being honest, he didn't feel like a Barsanti anymore.
Matty had confessed that to Johnny Amaro, expecting his uncle to lecture him about family loyalty, but that had been the man's response: you are who you choose to be. Guilt nagged at Matty for years afterward, and he eventually tried to be that person, but it wasn't him.
He'd chosen differently.
And as Matty sat beneath the blinding fluorescents in that busy hospital waiting room, he just kept wondering... who was he? If he wasn't a Barsanti, what did that make him? The name was inked on his chest, a permanent part of his body, but what the hell did being a Barsanti mean for somebody?
Sighing, Matty dropped his head down low, running his hands through his hair. The clock ticked away, torturous minutes passing where everything he knew remained in limbo. Every time a door opened, every time someone walked in, his head darted up, eyes seeking somebody, desperate for information.
Emergency C-Section. Full placental abruption.
That was all they'd told him as they'd hauled her away.
Genna was having their baby.
He couldn't be there for her.
They told him to wait.
Wait…
Wait…
Wait…
Please, God, let them be okay.
"She's going to be fine, you know," Gavin said, sitting to Matty's left. "We're talking about Genna with a G here. That girl is damn near as tenacious as her brother. They're like cockroaches."
"Gavin…"
"I'm just saying, it'll take a nuclear bomb to wipe those two out. I'm not worried about either one. Dante's like the Hulk. He probably couldn't kill himself if he wanted. It's that Galante blood. Hell, it wouldn't even surprise me if Primo walked through that door right now, still kickin'."
Someone entered then, and Matty glanced up. Not Primo, no, but close enough to be concerning. Dante. He stood across the waiting room, his expression stoic, nothing sympathetic about his eyes as they pierced right through Matty.
The guy hated him, no question about it.
He probably always would.
And that feeling was mutual.
Dante wandered over, still wearing a bloody shirt, earning him concerned looks from everyone he passed. A deranged look swaddled him, everything disheveled, his bloodshot eyes lined with dark bags, like sleep was just a fleeting memory. He dropped into the empty chair to the right of Matty, slouching and stretching his legs out, tilting his head back to stare up at the bright ceiling.
"I fucking hate this place," Dante muttered.
He was talking to himself, but Matty still responded. "So do I."
"Can I third that?" Gavin asked. "Thank God my father's being released this week so I never have to come back here."
Dante laughed dryly. "I said that after they released me and I've been back twice since. It's a fucking curse."
"Just when I thought I was out," Matty muttered, "they pull me back in again."
Gavin laughed at the Godfather III quote, while Dante closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's like summoning fucking Satan."
A grin touched Matty's lips. "You sound like your sister."
"You mean my sister sounds like me," Dante said. "I taught that girl everything she knows."
"Hence why she's so aggravating," Gavin pointed out. "Got that from him."
"Oh, fuck off." Dante stood to pace around, his gaze scanning the room, settling on the clock on a far wall. "How long has she been wherever the fuck she is? How long is this supposed to take?"
"Relax," Gabriella said as she approached, handing coffees to both Matty and Gavin before shoving Dante back into the chair. She dropped two white pills into his palm and offered a bottle of water. "Take this."
Dante looked at her. "Vicodin?"
"Tylenol."
"You couldn't find anything stronger?"
"Yes," she said, "it's called a morphine drip, which they would've been happy to give you had you not checked yourself out like this is just some motel instead of a friggin hospital."
Dante popped the pills in his mouth and took the
water from her. He drank damn near half of it in one guzzle before grabbing Gabriella and drawing her to him. Instead of pulling her into his lap, he stood up, slipping around her, shoving her into the chair so he could pace again.
"True or false," Dante said, "the security guards are armed."
Gabriella glared at him. "I swear to God…"
"I'm not going to do anything," he said, shooting her a look. "I'm just wondering, if I burst into an operating room, what my chances of getting killed for it are."
"Some of them carry guns," she said. "So I'd say you've got a pretty good chance of being shot."
"Noted."
He paced a few more seconds before Gabriella jumped up, grabbing ahold of him, shoving him back into the chair so hard he winced. She dropped the bottle of water into his lap, pointing right at his face, close enough the tip of her finger jabbed the end of his nose. "You stay right here. I'm going to go see what I can find out. Ugh, if anyone around here is even still talking to me since I got fired."
Matty expected an argument from Dante, tensing as he waited for that famed Galante temper, but Dante just sat there, stretching his legs out and leaning his head back, staring up at the ceiling again.
"She got fired?" Confusion laced Gavin's voice. "When?"
"This morning," Dante muttered.
"Why?" Gavin asked. "What did she do?"
"Me," Dante said.
"Oh." A moment of silence passed before Gavin broke out into laughter. "Ah man, really? She lost her job for fucking around with you?"
"I don't see why that's so funny."
"Because," Gavin said, "you're the worst consolation prize ever."
Dante shot right back up, and Matty barely had enough time to move out of the way before the bottle of water hurled by him, hitting Gavin in the chest. Dante paced around, eyes continually flickering between the clock and the exit, before he turned his gaze on Matty. "How can you just sit there? Are you not bothered at all by this? Do you just not give a shit about my sister?"
"Of course I'm bothered," Matty ground out, "but making a scene doesn't help anybody."
"Helps me," Dante argued. "I feel a hell of a lot better when I'm doing something."
"I bet you do," Matty said. "Doesn't matter who gets hurt as long as the great and powerful Dante Galante feels better about himself. My brother can attest to that."