I Saved the Man He Shot, So the Mob Boss Kept Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Tube

In the mob boss's Canton house a surgeon puts a tube in Hugh's chest, Lena sets her terms, and at dawn she starts the first kiss; a car across the street is watching the house.

The house was a three-story brick corner in Canton.

Every floor had a lit window, and the street ran downhill to the water.

A doctor in a cardigan was waiting in the dining room with a canvas bag open on the table.

He was seventy and bald and unhurried.

He looked at the plastic wrap and tape on Hugh Cullen's chest, and then at me.

"Who did this?"

"I did," I said. "I'm an ER nurse."

"Good work," he said. "Stay. I need hands that know what they're doing."

By two in the morning there was a tube in Hugh's chest and a line in his arm.

A bag of something clear ran into it.

I had cut off his shirt, counted his breaths and taken his pressure four times.

The doctor washed up and said it would hold if nobody moved him and somebody watched him all night.

"I'll watch him," I said.

They had put Hugh in a back bedroom on the second floor.

The bed was rented, and it still had the tag on the rail.

I came out into the hall and found Nikos Galanis against the wall with his arms crossed.

Up close he was even bigger than he had looked in the back room.

His black hair was going gray over one ear, and his sweater sleeves were shoved up his forearms.

There was dried blood on his cuff.

He had not changed it.

"I'm going to say some things," I said, "and you can agree or you can drive me home."

"Say them."

"One. Nobody lies to me about this patient or the room he's in."

"Agreed," Nikos said.

"Two. His medicine, his visitors and whether he moves are my call, not yours."

He nodded once.

"Three. No door in this house gets locked from the outside. Mine least of all."

"There's no key to any door in this house that locks from the outside," he said. "I'll show you."

"Four. My sister stays out of it."

"She's at my grandmother's. She's eating."

His mouth moved at one corner.

"My grandmother is also asking her whether she has a boyfriend."

I had not expected to laugh, and I did, once, with my hand over my mouth.

Then I stopped, because my hand was shaking against my lips.

"I'm not going to ask you how he got that hole," I said.

"Good."

"I do my job. That's all I'm going to do."

"That's all I'm asking," Nikos said.

He did not say anything else.

I went back into the room and sat by Hugh's bed until the window turned gray.

At five I went down to the kitchen to find coffee, and there was a young man at the sink.

It was the one from under the coat hooks.

His sleeves were pushed to the elbow, and the water ran hot enough to steam the window.

He was scrubbing his hands with a dish brush.

They were red to the wrist.

He did not look up when I came in.

"Yianni," Nikos said from the doorway behind me. "Upstairs. Now."

The young man shut off the tap.

His hands shook so hard that he dropped the brush.

He went past me without looking at me, and I heard him take the stairs two at a time.

"He should see someone," I said.

"He's my brother. He'll sleep."

Nikos came into the kitchen and took a mug from the shelf with his left hand.

He filled it from the pot and set it in front of me.

I noticed it was his left hand, and I noticed that I noticed.

I held the mug in both hands and tried to drink.

It slopped over the rim.

"I can't stop shaking," I said.

"You've been working for six hours."

"I'm fine at work," I said. "I'm never like this at work."

"This isn't work."

"I know it isn't." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Tell me to sit down."

"Sit down," he said.

I put the mug on the counter and did not sit down.

I stepped up to him and took a handful of his sweater.

I pulled until he bent his head.

I kissed him.

He went still for a second.

Then he made a low sound in his chest.

His hand came up the back of my neck and covered all of it.

He kissed me back slowly, and I felt the shaking in my arms start to ease.

He lifted me onto the counter without any effort at all.

My knees went around his hips.

His other hand slid under my fleece and spread flat across my ribs, hot through my scrub top.

He put his mouth on my throat.

"Lena," he said against my skin.

I had not told him my name.

Dot must have, I thought, and then his thumb moved under the edge of my bra and I stopped thinking.

From upstairs came a flat, rising alarm.

I was off the counter before I knew I had moved.

It was Hugh's monitor, and I took the stairs fast.

His oxygen reading was sinking.

I fixed the line and sat him up, and watched the number climb back to where it should be.

When I turned around, Nikos was in the doorway with his hand on the frame.

His jaw was tight, and he was looking past me at the window.

"Come here," he said quietly. "Don't stand in the light."

I went and stood beside him.

Across the street, under a dead streetlamp, a gray sedan was parked with two men sitting in it.

They were not looking at the house.

They were looking at the second-floor window, at me.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"The hall," Nikos said. "They know there's a nurse."

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