My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Injection

Gemma's POV

Santino came up my father's front steps at nine in the morning with a grey folder in both hands.

He did not knock. He stood on the porch until Nino opened the door.

"Not for you," Nino said. "For her."

"It's for both of you," Santino said. "Please."

I sat at my father's dining table and read it page by page.

The certificate. The doctor's receipt. The bank slip with Lidia's name and the day my father was buried.

Then the night nurse's log, hour by hour, in the handwriting I had known since I was nineteen.

I read the last line twice.

"Three-fifty," I said.

"And then it's torn off," Santino said. "Dario wrote something in the margin."

He turned the page toward me.

"Tonight."

I did not make a sound.

I read it a third time, and my hands went cold.

Lidia had been my father's private nurse for four months before he died.

I had gotten her the job.

I had asked my father to give her a chance, because she was my friend and she was alone and she needed rent.

"Gemma," Nino said from the doorway.

His voice was strange.

"I need to tell you something. I should have told you three years ago."

I looked up.

He stood in the doorway with his hat in both hands, and his bad leg was shaking under him.

"Sit down, Nino."

"I can't."

"Tell me."

"The night Alberto died," he said, "I came to the house at four. He had called me at midnight. He said his chest felt wrong and he wanted me to take him to the hospital in the morning."

I put the log down.

"I let myself in with my key. The kitchen was dark. I went up the back stairs."

He swallowed.

"Lidia came out of his room at ten past four. She was carrying a small black case, the kind a nurse uses for needles."

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