Chapter 1 - MECHANIC’S WAGES
Dante Costa’s hand closed around Camila Rossi’s wrist before she completed her first step away from the booth.
The grip was controlled, almost insultingly precise. He did not squeeze hard enough to bruise her. He did not need to. Around them, the bass continued shaking the ice inside a dozen crystal glasses, but every man in Dante’s private section had stopped moving.
“Say that again,” he ordered. “Looking at me this time.”
Camila turned slowly. Her heart struck her ribs hard enough to hurt, but exhaustion had carried her beyond the point where fear could make her obedient. She lifted her chin toward Dante’s pale gray eyes and repeated the Sicilian insult her grandfather had used for men who mistook intimidation for strength.
“Kunut maluminu.”
For one suspended second, she wondered whether she had just shortened her life.
Then Dante grinned.
It was not a kind expression, but it was the first honest one she had seen on his face.
“My grandmother used to say that,” he murmured. “Usually before she threw something.”
“She sounds sensible.”
Leo, the scar-jawed man guarding the velvet rope, lowered his eyes as if hiding a reaction. Dante released Camila’s wrist and glanced at the blood-speckled invoice she had slammed onto the table moments earlier.
Two nights ago, one of his men had arrived at Camila’s below-street-level clinic with a shattered collarbone and a bullet lodged beside his femoral artery. Four hours of surgery had left blood beneath Camila’s fingernails, ruined half her remaining supplies, and forced her to call in favors for compatible blood. The men who carried the patient away had dropped an envelope containing $5,700 onto her stainless-steel tray.
Her invoice was for $17,000.
Camila had waited behind Lombra’s velvet rope for an hour to collect the difference. Dante’s answer had been to compare her work to patching a tire and tell her to accept mechanic’s wages.
Now he stood and buttoned his jacket.
“Leo, bring the invoice.”
“I’m taking it with me,” Camila said.
Dante’s gaze returned to her. “Then bring the doctor too.”
He led her through an unmarked velvet curtain into a corridor where the music became a muffled pulse. His office waited behind steel doors: dark oak, old books, leather chairs, and the faint smell of gun oil beneath expensive cologne. Camila remained close to the exit while Dante removed his jacket and told her to sit.
“I would rather be paid.”
“You walked into my club, insulted me in my grandmother’s dialect, and survived the first minute.” Dante leaned against his desk. “You can spare another.”
Leo placed the invoice before him and left. This time Dante read every line: emergency blood, anesthesia, surgical extraction, stabilization, biohazard disposal, and the premium Camila charged for treating a man whose friends refused to provide his real name.
“Seventeen thousand,” Dante said.
“That is the legal value of the work, not the value of my silence. If I priced the risk to my license honestly, you couldn’t afford me.”
His eyebrows lifted. “I can afford you.”
“My clinic rent is overdue. That doesn’t make me purchasable.”
Dante opened a drawer, removed two bank-wrapped stacks of hundred-dollar bills, and placed them on the desk.
“Twenty thousand. The balance and a three-thousand-dollar retainer.”
Camila stared at enough money to keep her clinic open for months. “A retainer for what?”
“My organization is restructuring. Men who dislike that will express themselves with bullets. When my people require treatment, they come to you. You don’t work for another crew.”
“I treat sick people. I don’t inspect their affiliations.”
“You will now.”
“No.”
Dante walked around the desk until he stood behind her chair. “You can leave with the money, Camila. But understand something. The next time a man bleeds across your linoleum, it may be me.”
That stopped her.
The words were not a threat against her. They were an admission that Dante expected someone close enough to reach him to try.
Before Camila could answer, the office door opened. Leo entered holding a black ledger and the thin envelope that had been left at the clinic. His expression had changed.
“Boss, you should see this.”
Dante opened the ledger. His finger stopped beside a numbered disbursement bearing his signature and a countersignature underneath it.
DR. ROSSI — EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES — $17,000.
The envelope contained $5,700.
Dante counted it twice. The dangerous amusement vanished from his face, leaving something much colder.
“Who countersigned it?” Camila asked.
He did not answer immediately.
Leo did.
“Victor Sarto.”
Camila knew the name. Victor was Dante’s consigliere, his late father’s oldest friend, and one of the three men who had carried the injured patient out of her clinic.
Dante looked at the invoice again. “Victor has controlled emergency disbursements for eleven years.”
“Then he either stole from me,” Camila said, “or someone stole from him.”
“No one steals from Victor.”
“That sounds like faith, not evidence.”
The corner of Dante’s mouth moved, but the expression never reached his eyes. “You have a talent for saying dangerous things.”
“I also have a talent for noticing them.”
Camila removed her phone and opened the secured note she had written immediately after surgery.
“Your patient’s bleeding didn’t match his injuries. His blood took too long to clot, and there was a fresh needle puncture on his upper arm. I drew a citrate tube and sent it to my contract laboratory.”
Dante became completely still. “Why?”
“Because somebody injected him with something shortly before he reached me.”
Leo stepped toward her. “What kind of something?”
“I’ll know when the toxicology and anti-factor tests come back.”
Dante’s phone vibrated. He answered, listened for less than five seconds, and slowly looked at Leo.
“What?” Camila asked.
“The man you saved was Paolo Greco,” Dante said. “He disappeared from a guarded recovery house forty minutes ago.”
Camila’s own phone began ringing.
The clinic alarm company flashed across the screen.
Someone had just broken into the room where Paolo’s medical waste had been stored.
Dante closed his hand over the unpaid invoice. “You came here to collect a debt, Doctor.”
Camila looked at the ledger, then at the cash somebody had removed from the envelope and assumed she would be too frightened to question.
“No,” she said quietly. “I think I came here because someone needed to know I wasn’t afraid.”
May you like
Dante’s gaze hardened toward the closed office door.
“Good,” he said. “Because someone robbed us both.”
