Page 19 of Mafia Doctor

It was now or never.

Exploding to his feet like a sprinter coming off the blocks, he sent Goon Number One tumbling to the floor with a savage punch to the throat, then nearly tumbled to the ground himself trying to get the knife from its compartment. Ripping his shoe off, he slid the weapon free.

Goon Number Two belatedly reached for his gun, but he was too slow. Dante’s blade was buried in his throat before his fingers were even on the trigger, and his gun became Dante’s. As his dropped phone shattered on the ground, Goon Number Three fumbled with his own gun before taking three bullets to the chest.

Then it was Dante’s turn to make a potentially fatal mistake.

Meticulous as always, he turned to finish off Goons Number One and Two, each with a double-tap to the head, but after the fourth and final shot he spun too slowly back toward the door.

A shot rang out, and Dante’s leg was engulfed by pain so intense he nearly blacked out. He’d been shot plenty of times, but he didn’t need his medical degree to know this was different.

As he collapsed to the ground, he could tell instantly that the bullet had shattered his femur, and the hot blood gushing from the wound made clear that his femoral artery was severed as well.

He was as good as dead.

Which meant Amy was as good as dead.

Just when she was about to sit down and give herself the luxury of another one-minute cry, Amy heard shots, and without a moment’s hesitation she knew what they meant.

Dante had come to rescue her.

But as she inched down the hallway in the direction of the gunfire, anticipating the sight of her kidnapper-turned-knight-in-shining-armor emerging unscathed from battle to ravage her while still drenched in the blood of his enemies, exultation gradually faded to worry and then dread.

What if Dante was the one who had been shot?

The terror that gripped her at that thought wasn’t only for her own fate, she realized.

And it wasn’t just fear she was feeling, either. She may have been on the run from him an hour ago, but if Dante was hurt she was going to shoot off her piece of shit uncle’s dick and jam what was left of it down his throat before unloading the rest of the clip into his fucking smug face.

Doing her best to keep her steps quiet despite her fury and still clutching the gun from Gennaro’s desk in her hands, Amy tiptoed until she reached a door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar, and she peaked inside only to have her worst fears confirmed. Dante was on the ground in a pool of blood with Gennaro standing over him.

Rage and terror warred within her for a split second, then rage won out. Without another moment’s hesitation, Amy burst through the door and opened fire.

It wasn’t until she’d emptied her clip that she realized how badly she’d misjudged the range and the difficulty of hitting a moving target. She’d put at least one in him, she was sure, but only in his arm, and he was still on his feet and firing back.

Fortunately for her, Gennaro was the kind of man who ordered hits, not the kind who carried them out. His aim seemed as unpracticed as hers, and the bullet now lodged in his right arm meant he was shooting with his left. When his clip was empty, Amy remained unscathed.

But Gennaro was still coming at her, the wound seeming to have merely enraged him, and even with one arm out of commission he still outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds.

Fuck.

Darting around him, she made for the gun she saw on the floor beside Dante, and those personal training sessions she’d splurged on with Enzo’s money paid off because she got to it first.

Picking it up, she spun around to see Gennaro just a few feet away, charging toward her at full speed. Time seemed to slow down as she raised the gun and pulled the trigger an instant before he collided with her.

The impact sent her tumbling, and her head hit the floor with a sickening crunch.

CHAPTER 4

“Have you done your physical therapy exercises today?” Nurse Ruth asked as she walked into the room with fresh wound dressing. Her eyebrow was raised at Dante as if she already knew his answer.

“Not yet…” Dante answered sheepishly.

“You didn’t do them yesterday either,” Ruth noted as she rearranged the blankets around his leg and began unwrapping the bandage there. “Your PT said every day, twice a day if you feel up to it. You know it will help you walk, and it will get me out of your house and off your back quicker, too,” she said with a smirk.

“You? On my back? Never,” Dante said with as much sarcasm as he could muster, sitting up a little straighter with a cringe as she began cleaning the wound. “I can already walk just fine.”

“Mhm,” she said, “Typical man. Let’s get you outside in the gardens to do your exercises, it’s beautiful out today. You could use the fresh air.”

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