I Brought the Don Back to Burn My Husband novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Prove It

At gunpoint Mara takes the Don's pulse, reads his eyes and draws his blood, and sets her terms; he tells her to pose as his mistress.

Two guns came up before my sentence had finished.

Lucian Ruggiero lifted one finger, and they stayed up.

"Say why," he said.

His voice was low and tired and completely calm.

"Because you've had that cup every evening for weeks," I said, "and you're not getting better."

"No."

"Your pulse is slow, then it skips. Do you feel sick after you eat?"

"Most days."

"Does the lamp look yellow to you? Rings around the light?"

His eyes went to the lamp on the desk.

For the first time, he wasn't completely still.

"Since the second month," he said.

"Then I need your wrist."

The man at my shoulder said something low in Italian. Lucian answered him in one word, and the man stepped back half a pace.

I crossed the room and knelt by the chair.

His hand was cold and dry. I put two fingers on the inside of his wrist and counted.

Under my fingers his pulse crashed from slow to fast and back again.

It jumped the moment I touched him, a hard double beat that had nothing to do with his heart disease, and I put it down to the poison and kept counting.

"Thirty-eight," I said. "A healthy man your age runs sixty at rest. You've been running like this for weeks and nobody stopped it."

"Nine doctors looked at me."

"Nine doctors saw a famous man with a terminal diagnosis and agreed with the first one who said it."

His mouth moved. It wasn't a smile.

"I need a syringe, a tube and a clean cup," I said. "I want the blood and the tea tested for one drug in particular."

"You think you know which."

"I think a man's heart doesn't fail in stages that fit a schedule. I think someone gives him a little of a heart drug every day and calls it his illness."

Nobody in the room spoke.

"Fetch what she asks," Lucian said.

The big guard went out, and came back with a leather case.

"It was the family doctor's," he said. "He died in his car last month."

"Of what?" I asked.

"They called it his heart too."

I took the blood from Lucian's arm myself, with the muzzle of a gun at the edge of my vision.

My hands were steady, and I let myself notice it.

"There's a clinic on Court Street that the family owns," Lucian said. "Results in an hour."

"Send both samples. Send them with someone who won't talk."

The guard took the tubes and the cup and left.

"You'll wait here," Lucian told me.

I sat in the chair across from him, and for a while the fire was the loudest thing in the room.

"You came here with my enemy's gun," he said.

"It's my husband's."

"Then what does your husband want from you?"

"Nothing anymore. He just wants me out of his house with nothing."

"And what do you want from me, dottoressa?"

"A place no lawyer can walk into. And a few weeks, so I can show you your own heart works."

"For that, you'd bet your life on a blood test."

"I'd bet it on what I can see," I said. "Your pulse. Your lamp. Your tea."

Nothing else was said until the phone on the desk rang.

He put it on speaker. The guard read out numbers I understood instantly.

The drug in his blood was at three times the level a body could stand. The tea held more of it than a cup should.

"He's never been prescribed it," the guard said. "Not by anyone."

Lucian was silent for a long moment.

Then he looked at me and said, "Tell me what you need."

"Everything you eat or drink goes through my hands, nobody else's. No pills from the old bottles. And nobody in this house learns what I am."

"Agreed."

"I don't leave the compound without two of your men. You don't lie to me about this house."

"I don't lie," he said, and something crossed his face and went. "Anything else."

"No. That's all."

"I have one." His eyes held mine. "Someone in this house gave me that cup. If they learn there's a doctor in it, you're dead by Friday and I'm no better."

"Then what do I say I am?"

"Something nobody questions."

He nodded toward the door and the dark house beyond it.

"Tonight you are my mistress."

I almost laughed.

"I left my husband an hour ago for exactly that," I said.

"Then you already know the part," said Lucian Ruggiero. "Only now you're on the other side of it."

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