Chapter 6 - THE MAN WHO SHOULD HAVE DIED
Federal agents found Paolo behind a locked fire door at St. Agnes, chemically sedated and restrained inside a room registered to a fictional patient. Camila entered only after officers cleared the floor.
His condition was serious but reversible. He was dehydrated, his surgical wound was infected, and sedatives had suppressed his breathing, but his pulse strengthened after fluids, oxygen, and the reversal of one medication.
Camila stabilized him for transport to a real hospital, where an independent trauma team assumed his care under police protection.
Dante stood behind the glass outside intensive care. He did not ask to enter.
“Paolo’s father worked for mine,” he told Camila. “We learned to drive in the same stolen Buick.”
“You say that as if it’s charming.”
“It wasn’t stolen when we returned it.”
Despite herself, she smiled.
Paolo regained consciousness the following evening. Lim recorded the interview with his attorney present and his physician’s approval. His first answers came in fragments, interrupted by pain and confusion, but the account became clearer as the sedatives left his system.
Paolo had discovered that Lakeshore shipments listed surgical anesthetics while the containers actually held fentanyl precursor chemicals. Victor and Raffaele Orsini, the head of a rival organization, were using Costa warehouses without Dante’s authorization. Paolo copied two manifests and arranged to show Dante.
Matteo Sarto intercepted him first.
Matteo’s men shot Paolo during a staged robbery, then carried him to Camila’s clinic when the femoral wound failed to kill him quickly enough. In the vehicle, Matteo injected him with heparin from a preloaded syringe and called it pain medication. He expected Paolo to bleed out during surgery.
Camila had ruined the plan by keeping him alive.
Afterward, Victor’s men collected Paolo, removed him from the recovery house, and transferred him to St. Agnes. They underpaid Camila because Victor had spent years diverting emergency funds into Lakeshore and assumed an exhausted neighborhood doctor would never confront Dante directly.
“The invoice brought her to Lombra,” Dante said.
Paolo’s cracked lips moved in something resembling a smile. “Victor never understood women who don’t scare properly.”
The stolen money had exposed the same shell company used to finance the coup. Camila’s demand for payment had connected the ledger, Lakeshore, the counterfeit medications, the anticoagulant, and Paolo’s kidnapping.
Lim asked about St. Joseph’s Day.
Paolo closed his eyes. “Victor said Dante would kneel at his mother’s grave, and Orsini’s shooter would make the family choose a new boss before the blood dried.”
Dante walked out before the interview ended.
Camila found him in an empty hospital chapel, standing beneath a wooden cross with both hands braced against the back of a pew.
“He was family,” Dante said. “Victor taught me to tie a necktie for my mother’s funeral. He stood beside me when my father died. Every important decision I made passed through him.”
“That gave him access. It didn’t give him ownership.”
Dante looked at her. “I could end this tonight.”
“You could kill him.”
“Yes.”
“And then Orsini replaces him with someone else. The shipments continue, the evidence becomes inadmissible, and you spend the rest of your life wondering which man near you is waiting to retaliate.”
“He tried to murder Paolo.”
“I know.”
“He fired into your clinic.”
“I know.”
“He could have killed Sofia.”
Camila stepped closer. “That’s why I want consequences he cannot escape, not a body his friends can turn into a martyr.”
Dante’s anger did not vanish. It changed direction.
“If I cooperate with Lim, she gets my books too.”
“Yes.”
“I lose the warehouses. Lombra. Everything connected to them.”
“Possibly.”
“And prison?”
“Your attorney can answer that.”
Dante gave a bitter laugh. “You really are terrible at comfort.”
“I’m not here to make the truth painless.”
He looked toward the gold St. Agatha medal resting against her throat. “What are you here for?”
Camila considered the question. Seven days earlier, she would have answered that she was there for the unpaid invoice. Now she saw a wounded man trying to decide whether power mattered more than becoming someone different from his father.
“To make sure the man beneath the name gets a choice,” she said.
Dante’s phone rang.
Victor had summoned him to a private St. Joseph’s dinner at Lombra. He claimed the captains needed reassurance after the shootings and insisted Dante come without police or outsiders.
It was an invitation to his own execution.
May you like
Dante ended the call and looked at Camila.
“Then I choose,” he said.
