Chapter 8: Rule One

The safe house was a brick row house on the edge of the harbor, with a steel door and no name on the mailbox.

In the car I had kept hearing Cesare's words about the one relative who asked where I worked.

Only Bruna had ever known my shifts, and I had let her pour my coffee.

The family doctor was already there when we arrived.

He cut away Cesare's sleeve and said the bullet had gone through the meat of the arm and missed the bone.

He cleaned it, packed it and stitched it in nine minutes.

"Rest it for a week," he said. "No lifting, no driving."

"I'll manage," Cesare said.

The doctor looked at me, and I raised my eyebrows.

"He won't," the doctor told me. "Make him."

He packed his bag and left.

The house went quiet.

Cesare sat on the edge of a plain kitchen chair with his shirt hanging off one shoulder and blood drying on his chest.

I stood by the sink with a bowl of warm water and a cloth.

"You can go to bed," he said. "I'll sit up with the door."

"You're covered in blood."

"I'll wash in the morning."

"You'll sleep in it?"

He did not answer.

I crossed the kitchen before I had decided to.

I wrung out the cloth and began on his shoulder, where the blood had dried in a dark line toward his collarbone.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Don Played Broke to Test Me, So I Left With His Baby from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.