Page 89 of The Woman with the Wallet

“Alright, honey. We need to take you to get a scan of your knee and head. Maybe your ribs. It will be at a facility. But we’ll be going in the back door and avoiding paperwork. After that, depending on what the scans say, you might not have any choice but to go to the hospital,” he warned. “If you don’t need surgery, though, I can take care of you at my office.”

“Alright,” Lil agreed. “But…” she said, looking around her place.

“We’ll take care of this,” I assured her.

With that, Salvatore led her out the door and into a car parked half on the sidewalk out front.

“You need to sit,” I told Max, trying to push her into a chair.

“No. No, I want to help.”

She wrenched away from me, dropping down onto the floor, finding various bins, and painstakingly starting to sort the gems.

“I can help,” Zeno said, even though we both knew he was practically allergic to organization.

“No, I want you on this fuck,” I said, jaw tightening at the idea of what might have happened to Max if she hadn’t gotten her hands on that gun. “Find him. I want this done.”

He headed back out, leaving me to join Max on the floor for what seemed like an almost hopeless task.

“I’m starting to see why Lil thought it was absurd that I might think she had my diamonds,” I decided as we filled container after container of various gemstones.

“Yeah,” Max agreed, placing the last of the emeralds into a bin, then placing it on the table. “I guess this is her retirement plan when she gets sick of the work.”

“Did you happen to get a chance to talk to Lil?” I asked. “About why he was here?”

“No. There wasn’t time. He was here. Then we were fighting. She passed me the gun. Then he was gone, and I was trying to see how she was.”

“We can talk to her once Sal gets her patched up.”

“Does he actually know what he’s doing?”

“The whole Family uses him. He works out of an actual doctor’s office. And he’s been slowly adding fancy-ass medical equipment to it. He even has a surgery room now. She’s in the best hands. Definitely getting more one-on-one care than she’d get at one of the overcrowded hospitals.”

“Okay,” Max agreed, finished with the bigger diamonds, then reached for a piece of paper, using it to sweep the tiniest of them into a pile.

“As soon as he’s done, he will call me. We can go there, talk to her. Bring her home, if that’s what she wants.”

“She can’t come back here. She can’t be alone,” Max said. “She needs someone to help her. To… protect her.”

“We will figure it out,” I assured her. “I’ve got security covered. And if she needs help getting around, I can hire a nurse. Or have one of my sisters come and help. Whatever she needs. She’s not going to be alone.”

“Megs,” she said, looking up at me with wide, panicked eyes.

“Megs should be almost to her inn by now.”

“But what if…”

“Max, baby, focus, okay? If he was here, he can’t catch up to Megs and Nicole. If you want, I can make my brother hang in town, watch them from a distance. But I genuinely think they are safe where they are.”

“Okay. Right. Yeah, you’re right,” she said, and I watched as she started to compartmentalize her emotions, making them more manageable. “Let’s just hope Zeno can figure out who this asshole is, so this stops once and for all.”

“Did he say anything? Anything that might help us narrow him down?”

“No. He mostly said he should have killed me the last time. Then it was just a lot of cursing and fighting.”

We worked for another two hours before we had the place straightened. Not knowing where to put anything, we just left everything on the tables, so when Lil was well enough, she could organize how she wanted.

By the time we had cleaned up the blood, Salvatore had shot me a text, telling me we could come to his office to see Lil.

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