Page 17 of Dragonfly

I blame Lincoln for this. For fifteen years, he was a miserable bastard who obsessed over the one woman who got away. But then he blackmailed Ava Monroe into becoming Ava Crewes, and now he’s a smug bastard with a devoted wife, a kid on the way, and a satisfied smirk every time I see him that says he found the secret to the pleasures in life after he said ‘I do’.

For whatever reason, Savannah hates me enough that she was willing to attack me on my own turf with my own knife. Fine. I don’t need her love to make her my bride. To own her. To control her. I just need her to go along with it, and if she knows what’s good for her, she will.

Prison. Death. Marriage.

I gave her a choice. It’s up to her to decide what her fate will be, and when she does nothing but grit out her answer—“Yes”—it’s sealed.

Vin muscled her into the backseat of my Maserati. Once she agreed to my madness, I jerked my chin at the car. I’m sure my cousin also thinks that the stab wound has rendered me temporarily insane, but he didn’t hesitate. Moving quicker than he should be able to for a man of his size, he has her tucked in the back in seconds while I double-check my injury, then move toward the driver’s side.

There’s blood. A good amount of it, too, staining my dress shirt. The adrenaline has worn off enough that each step is agony. I swallow the pain, too stubborn to let anyone see how much it still fucking hurts, but Vin meets me at the door before I can open it.

“I’ll drive, boss.”

“Over my dead body.”

His jaw goes tight. “If you don’t hurry up and get that checked out by Dr. Lizzie, that might just be the case. C’mon. You really want me to have to tell Genny that you got offed on my watch?”

Genevieve. My baby sister might not be a baby anymore, but I’ll be damned if she needs to know just how dangerous the life is. I’ve spent years protecting her from the realities of running a mafia syndicate in a city like Springfield. She doesn’t need to know about any of this for now.

Of course, Vincent is right. If I stubbornly bleed out on the street, she will know—and he’ll have to be the one to break the news to her.

Even in the Family, family comes first, and I won’t do that to my sister or my cousin.

“Fine,” I concede. Careful not to jostle my wounded side, I pull out my phone from my jacket pocket and check the time. “Elizabeth should still be at the office. She can patch me up first.”

Vin raises his eyebrows when he hears ‘first’, but he doesn’t comment on it. He just waits for me to move away from the door so that he can take the driver’s seat.

I don’t let anyone drive my cars. I especially don’t let anyone drive them when I’m still capable of taking the wheel. But if I’m going to take a page out of Lincoln’s playbook, I need to move fast.

I want a wife. More than that, I want this feisty, murderous woman to be that wife.

And while Vin speeds toward the other side of the East End, I fire off message after message to make sure that she will be before she can change her mind and decide that she’d rather risk the wrath of my men.

Because one thing for sure? Now that I’ve seen this side of her and decided I wanted to keep her, I won’t change mine.

Doctor Elizabeth Harper spends more than seventy hours a week at the Springfield East Clinic. The only doctor on the staff, she accepts a small paycheck to take care of any patient in need that walks through her doors.

For a much, much larger one, Elizabeth—also known as Liz to some, or Dr. Lizzie to Vin—is the Dragonflies’ resident fixer-upper. Like so many of the SPD, she’s on my payroll. Any one of my men who gets shot, stabbed, assaulted… any of them who needs some patchwork, they just have to head to the clinic, flash their mark, and Liz will take care of it, no questions asked.

Unlike the cops on the force, I don’t have to bribe her to keep her mouth shut. The money helps—and she’s worth every penny—but I earned her loyalty years ago when I found out that one of my soldiers was hassling the clinic, demanding to be paid for protection.

To me, that was outsourcing. If I didn’t give the okay for the soldier to roll a local business, he was betraying the Family. You betray the Family, you die. It’s as simple as that. So I had the soldier taken care of, then visited the clinic myself to assure the overworked doctor that she didn’t need to pay my men to watch over her. She’s a do-gooder, and I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for those. I could’ve used a place like the free clinic when I was getting started in the life, and I threw a donation her way to make up for the trouble the dead soldier caused her.

Somehow, without even meaning to, I bought myself a doc. Further proof that I didn’t need to plot and plan and manipulate things for them to fall into place, and as Savannah sits silently in the exam room while Liz examines my stab wound, I just know that my impulsive decision to keep this woman will work out just the same.

It fucking has to.

I don’t know what surprised the good doctor more: the way I strode into her office with the knife in my side, or the fact that Savannah was sandwiched between Vin and me. That was non-negotiable. One way or another, I won’t let that woman out of my sight until I’m ready to. I also don’t trust Vin not to finish her off before she can try to come after me again.

Has the blood loss gone to my head? Perhaps, because I almost look forward to her doing just that.

Liz is about my age, give or take a few years. She wears her hair pulled back and out of her face, a pencil stuck into the golden yellow bun. Her lips purse a little when she does a preliminary examination of my wound.

She doesn’t ask how I ended up with my own knife in my side. She’s too smart to ask questions she won’t like the answer to.

Instead, she tuts as she moves away from my bloody shirt. “Sutures,” she announces. “Let me gather up what I’m going to need, then… Vincent?”

Vin straightens up from his post beside Savannah. “Yeah, doc?”

---