Chapter 1 - The Mafia Boss Showed Up Drunk at My Door Whispering, “I Need You”—I Never Expected What Came Next
The knock came at 2:14 a.m.
It was not the polite tap of a neighbor or the frantic pounding of a drunk who had the wrong floor. It was a heavy, dead sound, like flesh striking cheap wood.
I should have kept the deadbolt thrown. I should have looked through the peephole and gone straight back to bed.
Instead, I opened the door.
Roman Bianchi stood on my welcome mat, bleeding and reeking of expensive Scotch and copper.
“I need you,” he slurred.
Then he collapsed.
He hit the linoleum with a sickening thud that I felt through the soles of my feet. For 10 seconds, I simply stared at him.
Roman Bianchi was a ghost story whispered through the financial district, a name spoken quietly in the kitchens of restaurants I could never afford. I knew him because he owned the building that housed the dive bar where I worked. Twice a month, he sat in the back booth, drank water with lemon, and watched the room as though he were calculating the price of everyone’s soul.
We had spoken exactly once.
I had spilled a drop of coffee on his cuff. He had looked at me with dead, unreadable eyes and told me to breathe.
That was all.
Now he was lying facedown in my hallway, bleeding onto a rug I had bought at Target for $12.
My first instinct was to reach for the phone sitting on the entry table, a cheap piece of plastic capable of summoning the police with 3 digits.
But you did not call the police on a Bianchi.
Not unless you wanted your teeth mailed to your mother.
The police would not arrest him. They would probably apologize for the inconvenience, shoot me for making a mess, and carry him away on a silk stretcher.
I cursed, a harsh sound in the quiet apartment, and dropped to my knees.
“Roman.”
I slapped his cheek.
His skin was freezing and clammy with shock.
“Hey. Wake up. You can’t die here. My landlord will keep my deposit.”
He groaned, a wet, rattling sound.
I grabbed the shoulders of his suit jacket. Tom Ford, ruined and sticky with dark arterial blood. Then I pulled.
He was pure dead weight, 200 lb of muscle and violence.
I braced my bare feet against the doorjamb and hauled him backward. My spine screamed. My breathing hitched. Inch by agonizing inch, I dragged him from the public hallway into my living room.
Then I kicked the door shut and threw the deadbolt.
My hands were shaking.
When I looked down, they were painted crimson.
“Damn it.”
I wiped them on my sweatpants.
I did not have a medical degree. I had been 2 years into nursing school when my father’s gambling debts caught up with us, forcing me to drop out and begin working double shifts to keep my kneecaps intact.
But I knew enough to understand that a man losing this much blood had a clock ticking toward zero.
I rolled Roman onto his back.
He grunted, his eyes fluttering open for a fraction of a second. They were dark, unfocused, and terrifyingly empty.
“Hold still,” I muttered, mostly to myself.
I ripped open his shirt.
The buttons scattered across the cheap laminate floor like tiny white teeth.
The wound was on his left side, just beneath the ribs.
It was not a bullet hole.
It was a deep, jagged slice.
A knife.
Someone had gotten close.
Someone he probably trusted.
You did not sink a blade that deeply into a man like Roman Bianchi from the front unless he allowed you into his personal space.
I ran to the bathroom and grabbed my medical kit.
It was not a standard first-aid box. When you lived in a neighborhood where gunshots were background noise, you kept heavy-duty gauze, butterfly closures, and medical superglue beneath the sink.
I knelt beside him again and poured saline directly into the wound.
Roman roared.
It was not a scream. It was an animal sound of pure fury.
His eyes snapped open.
Before I could move, his hand shot out and clamped around my throat.
His grip was a steel vise.
I choked, my hands flying to his wrist as I clawed at his skin.
“You,” he rasped.
His breath was hot and heavy with top-shelf liquor and iron.
His eyes finally focused on my face.
Recognition flickered through the pain.
The bartender.
“Let go,” I wheezed, digging my nails into his arm.
He stared at me.
His chest heaved, and blood bubbled from the wound with every frantic beat of his heart.
For 1 second, I thought he would snap my neck on instinct alone.
Then the tension left him.
His eyes rolled back, and his hand dropped to the floor.
I collapsed backward, coughing violently and dragging air into my burning lungs.
For a long minute, I sat there watching his chest rise and fall unevenly.
Part of me wanted to leave him there.
Let him bleed out.
The city would be safer.
I would be safer.
But I was not a killer, not even through omission.
I crawled back to him.
I packed the wound with gauze and applied brutal pressure until my arms ached and my wrists went numb.
He did not move again.
When the bleeding finally slowed to a sluggish ooze, I began the ugly work of pulling the torn skin together. I layered butterfly strips over the wound and sealed the smaller tears with medical glue.
It was crude work, almost butchery, but it would keep his insides where they belonged.
When I finished, my living room looked like a slaughterhouse.
Blood-soaked towels were piled in a corner. Empty saline bottles rolled across the floor.
I sat back on my heels and looked at him.
Without the terrifying aura of power surrounding him, he looked like only a man.
Pale.
Exhausted.
Broken.
His dark hair clung to his forehead with sweat, and the hard lines of his jaw had gone slack.
I found an old Afghan on the back of the sofa and threw it over him.
It was aggressively yellow, crocheted by my grandmother, patterned with daisies.
It made him look absurd.
A mob boss under a flowered blanket.
I did not sleep.
I dragged a kitchen chair into the corner, made a pot of black coffee, and sat in the dark watching Roman breathe.
I waited for him to die or wake up.
I was not sure which possibility frightened me more.
The garbage trucks came at 5:30 a.m., their hydraulic brakes squealing like slaughtered pigs.
Light slowly bled through the blinds, a dirty gray illumination that made my apartment look even cheaper than it was.
I was drinking my 3rd mug of coffee. It tasted like battery acid, but it kept my eyes open.
Roman moved.
At first, it was only a twitch of his fingers and a slight turn of his head.
Then the pain registered.
He hissed through clenched teeth, and his eyes snapped open.
He did not thrash.
He did not panic.
That was the most unsettling part.
Roman Bianchi woke in an unfamiliar room, severely wounded, and his first reaction was complete stillness.
His dark eyes moved around the apartment, taking in the peeling paint, the stack of unpaid bills on the counter, and the blood-soaked towels piled in the corner.
Finally, his gaze landed on me.
I sat in the kitchen chair with both hands wrapped around my warm mug and watched him back.
I said nothing.
I let him understand the situation for himself.
He slowly pushed himself onto his elbows.
The yellow Afghan gathered around his waist.
He looked down at his side, inspecting my crude repair.
His expression became one of cold calculation.
He touched the butterfly closures, his jaw tightening.
“You didn’t call a doctor.”
His voice was gravel, roughened by sleep and dehydration.
“Doctors ask questions,” I said. “And they fill out police reports for knife wounds.”
Roman swung his legs around and sat upright.
He swayed slightly as the blood loss caught up with him, but he planted his feet and forced himself steady.
Then he looked at me.
Really looked at me.
“Nora.”
A chill moved down my spine.
I had never introduced myself to him.
To Roman, I had been nothing more than the girl wiping down the bar.
“You know my name.”
“I know the names of everyone who works in my buildings.”
He leaned back against my cheap sofa, ignoring the ruined shirt sticking to the upholstery.
“I also know you dropped out of nursing school, which explains the surprisingly competent stitch job.”
“It’s not stitches. It’s glue and tape. You need to go to a real hospital, or a private clinic, or wherever people like you go when they get stabbed by their friends.”
Dark amusement moved through his eyes.
“People like me?”
“Criminals,” I said flatly.
I was too tired to be polite.
“Mobsters. Sociopaths. Pick your noun.”
He did not become angry.
Instead, he smiled.
It was a small, dangerous expression that never reached his eyes.
“You have a sharp tongue for someone sitting 10 ft away from a man she just called a sociopath.”
“You’re welcome, by the way, for saving your life.”
“Why did you?”
The amusement vanished.
His question cut straight through me.
“You know who I am. You know what I do. You could have locked your door. You could have let me bleed out in the hallway. Why didn’t you?”
I took another sip of terrible coffee and looked away toward the dust moving through the gray morning light.
“Because I have to clean the hallway,” I lied. “And blood stains.”
“Bullshit.”
“Because I’m not a murderer.”
“Also bullshit. Everyone is a murderer under the right circumstances.”
Roman pushed himself to his feet.
He staggered and caught himself against the arm of the sofa.
Even half-dead, he was easily a foot taller than me, broad and physically imposing.
He took 1 slow, painful step toward me.
I stayed still.
My heart beat against my ribs like a trapped bird.
He stopped a few feet from the chair.
Up close, the copper smell of blood was overpowering, but beneath it was something else.
Cedar.
Spice.
The scent of a man accustomed to owning whatever world he entered.
“You saved me because you didn’t want to watch a man die,” he said quietly.
He leaned down until his face was inches from mine.
“That is a severe liability in my world, Nora.”
“I’m not in your world.”
“You are now.”
I froze.
“What?”
“I knocked on your door because you were the closest person I knew who wouldn’t immediately sell me out to the men who did this to me. It was a gamble.”
His obsidian eyes locked onto mine.
“You won the gamble for me. But you also saw me vulnerable. You know I’m weak right now. You know I’m bleeding.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
The cynicism in me cracked, exposing the panic beneath it.
“I don't care about your wars. I just want to go to my shift tonight and pay my rent.”
Roman reached out.
I flinched.
His thumb traced slowly along my jaw.
His skin felt burning hot.
“You don’t get to walk away,” he murmured. “I owe you my life. In my world, that is a debt that binds us. And I always keep what is mine.”
Then he stepped away.
The vulnerability disappeared.
The boss returned.
“Get me my phone from my jacket pocket.”
I stared at him.
“Then pack a bag. You’re coming with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
A terrifying calm settled over his face.
“The men who did this know I was in this neighborhood. By noon, they will be kicking down doors looking for the trail of blood.”
He looked toward the bloody towels and my ruined rug.
“Do you want to be here when they find this apartment?”
I looked at the mess.
Then I looked at the monster standing in my kitchen.
I put down my coffee mug and went to pack a bag.
I packed exactly what someone packed when they expected never to see their apartment again.
3 pairs of jeans.
A handful of shirts.
Clean underwear.
My toothbrush.
I did not take photographs.
I did not take the cheap jewelry my mother had left me.
If I survived, I could buy new things.
If I did not, sentimentality would not save me.
Roman was waiting beside the door when I zipped the duffel bag.
He had pulled his ruined suit jacket over the bloody shirt and buttoned it to hide the damage.
His face was the color of wet ash.
“Ready?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
He pushed himself away from the wall.
“Keep your head down. If someone sees us, look at the floor. Don't speak.”
We took the stairs.
The elevator had been broken since August, a fact I cursed with every step.
I wedged my shoulder beneath Roman’s arm and carried perhaps a 3rd of his weight.
He burned with fever and pain. His breathing hitched every time his left foot struck a stair.
The smell of iron became fresh again.
He was bleeding through the gauze.
“You’re tearing the glue,” I whispered fiercely when we reached the 2nd-floor landing.
“Keep moving.”
May you like
His fingers dug into my collarbone.
We spilled from the stairwell into the alley behind the building.
