Page 54 of Secret Baby for the Mafia Don

Elio’s face contorts with pain and his beautiful pianist’s hands trembled as he touches different parts of my body, disbelieving, uncertain of what to do for maybe the first time in his life.

“I’m more useful to you dead, Elio,” I say to him, trying to smile through the pain. “It’s better to let me go.”

“No!” Elio screams out, the sound jagged, like splinters driven under my skin.

He grabs my hand again, pressing it against his face which is wet with tears. “Don’t die, goddammit!” he cries, rocking back and forth a little as he grips my hand. “I need you, Kate. Don’t die.”

My mind, which feels as battered as my body, feels a momentary pang of defeat. Even now, as I am dying, he won’t admit to himself that he loves me.

He won’t even give me those precious words on my deathbed. I think of Mateo, and feel a terrible wash of sadness for my child, but I also feel triumph.

He is losing his mother, but he will win his freedom.

“The ambulance is on the way,” I hear Enzo say.

“They’re taking too long!” Elio rages, still rocking back and forth in an agony of emotion.

It’s fine, I want to say to them. Just let me go. But I can’t make my lips form the sounds.

I turn my head a little to see Elio better as the darkness slowly washes over me and I know, no more.

Chapter Twenty-One

Elio

The beeping of the damn monitors all around Kate is making me crazy.

I hate the small silence between each blip because it could be the last time that I hear them indicating that she is alive.

She is desperately fragile, more dead than alive, supported by so many different machines that I can’t count them all.

She certainly doesn’t look alive, swaddled in wires and tubes and the scratchy hospital blanket.

The air conditioning clicks on, and the cold air pouring into the room makes me shiver. I cast my glance around idly, wondering where my jacket went, and then remember that I left it at the Baldini house. I ignore the cold and hunker down in the chair beside her bed.

Kate must be feeling a thousand times worse than me. I deserve to be too cold and uncomfortable in the hard hospital chair.

Brain hemorrhage, the doctor had said. The fall had caused her to suffer a brain bleed and then she had a stroke. They told me all of this in a rapid-fire discussion before rushing off to do an emergency surgery to try and mitigate some of the damage to Kate’s brain.

I could tell that he thought that I pushed her down the stairs on purpose until Enzo and Luca came up demanding to know what her condition was.

He clearly recognized the Baldini boys and he had swallowed hard then said that he would try his best to save her life before he vanished into a surgical suite.

I had wanted to tear their throats out with my bare hands for doing this to her, for causing her to be injured so severely, but I had managed to restrain myself for Mateo’s sake.

I had funneled all of my anguish into a litany of repeated prayers begging for Kate to be okay, begging for her to make it through this.

I kept remembering her jumping onto Luca’s back with fierce strength, stabbing at him with the tiny knife. She had cut his cheek and I had felt a fierce surge of pride that she had been able to hurt him and that she had marred his pretty face.

All of my joy had been instantly erased the moment he had flung her off his back and she had vanished down the stairs.

I could still hear each thud of her body running into the stairs, the walls, and the railings of the staircase as she fell. The thought of the sounds her body had made as she tumbled down the huge staircase made me feel sick and dizzy.

“How is she?”

It’s Enzo’s voice, and I lift haunted eyes for a moment to glance at him before training my gaze on Kate’s face again.

I have the crazy notion that if I look away for a single moment, her soul might slip by me and vanish, leaving her empty husk here in the frightening and depressing hospital room. Leaving me alone.

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