My Husband Called Me Useless, Now a Mafia Don Owes Me His Life novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Evening Injection

Ada stops the family doctor from giving Rocco a nightly heart-drug dose five times too high, and Rocco makes the doctor take it first. She sets her terms, and Rocco's brother says her husband has phoned the gate three times to say she is unwell.

Rocco Barsanti kept his wrist in my hand for a long time.

Then he looked past me at the guard who still held Carson's pistol.

"Take the magazine out," he said. "Put the gun on my desk."

The guard did it.

"Everyone out of the hall," Rocco said. "Gia stays."

His sister came down the stairs in a gray cardigan with her glasses on a cord.

She was about my age, with black hair in a tight knot, and she looked me over from my wet shoes to my wet hair.

"Who is she?" Gia asked.

"Rensselaer's wife."

"Rensselaer's wife brought a gun to our house at ten at night."

"It's Rensselaer's gun," I said. "I wanted your men to see it."

Gia didn't smile.

"She says someone is poisoning me," Rocco said.

"Of course she does," Gia said. "And she'll cure you for a price."

"I haven't named a price."

"Then you're the first woman in this city who hasn't."

I turned to Rocco and left his sister alone.

"I need your last three weeks of bloodwork," I said. "I need to see every pill you take and every cup you drink from."

"My doctor does all of that."

"Then your doctor has been looking at it for months and calling it your heart."

His jaw moved.

"My doctor treated my father," he said. "He's the one man in this house I trust."

"Then let me watch him tonight and you'll know."

Rocco looked at the clock.

"He comes at eleven," Gia said slowly. "For the evening injection."

"What does he give you?" I asked.

"Something for the heart. A little every night."

The front door opened on the stroke of eleven.

A gray-haired man in a good coat came in carrying a leather case.

He nodded to Rocco and then frowned at me, standing wet in the hall with my sleeves pushed up.

"I wasn't told we had a guest," the doctor said.

"Sit down," Rocco told him. "Show us what you brought."

The doctor opened the case on the hall table.

He took out a small vial and a syringe and began to fill it.

"Stop," I said.

He kept filling.

"Put it down," I said again, "and let me read the label."

"Madam, I don't know who you are."

I picked up the vial before he could close his hand.

It was digoxin, a drug for weak hearts.

The dose on the label was five times what a man of Rocco's size needed, and it had been ordered nightly for four months.

I read the number out loud, and then I read the date.

"This is the dose you'd give a man who is already in heart failure," I said. "Is he in heart failure?"

Nobody answered.

"His pulse says he isn't. It says he's been given something that makes it skip."

"It's a standard regimen," the doctor said. "I've used it for thirty years."

"On a man with a normal heart?"

The doctor's eyes went to Rocco.

"Rocco," he said. "She's a stranger. You're going to take the word of a stranger over mine?"

"I'm going to take the dose," Rocco said.

He said it quietly, and everyone in the hall went still.

"You give it to yourself first," he told the doctor. "Right now. Half of what's in the vial."

The doctor went white.

"Rocco, I can't. It would stop my heart."

"Yes," I said. "It would."

A door banged upstairs.

A man came down the staircase two steps at a time, barefoot, in a black undershirt, with a broad worried face.

"Brother," he said. "What is this? The men woke me up."

"Tullio," Rocco said. "Come meet Mrs. Rensselaer."

Tullio Barsanti stopped on the bottom step and took me in with a warm, tired smile.

He was younger than Rocco, with curly hair and the kind of open face people told secrets to.

"Mrs. Rensselaer," he said. "You're soaked. Gia, get her a towel."

"Don't," I said, because Gia had already turned. "Don't give me anything from the kitchen."

Tullio's eyebrows went up.

"I'm sorry?"

"Nothing you didn't see me open myself," I said. "Not water, not coffee, not a towel from a closet. I'm sorry. It's a rule."

Gia's mouth tightened.

Rocco put out a hand, and a guard put the vial and syringe into it.

He held them for a moment, looking at the doctor.

"Lock him in the cellar room," he said. "Nobody speaks to him but me."

Two men took the doctor by the arms.

He didn't fight.

That told me more than the dose did.

When the hall was empty, Rocco turned and looked at me.

"Three terms," I said before he could speak. "First, I handle every cup and plate you touch. Second, nobody in this house learns anything about me until I decide to tell them."

"And third?" he said.

"You don't ask me my price until you're well."

"That's a short list for a woman who just walked into my house with a gun."

"I'm not going to bargain on the doorstep," I said. "I'm tired. I'm wet. And I just found out my husband has been planning my divorce for months."

His expression didn't change, but he said, "Done."

Gia gave a short, ugly laugh.

"I'll put her in the east wing," she said. "Next to the guards."

"Next to me," Rocco said.

Tullio looked from one of us to the other and smiled again, gently, a good brother being patient.

"Mrs. Rensselaer," he said, "your husband has rung the gate three times tonight."

I had turned my phone off so he couldn't reach me, and it hadn't mattered.

"He says you're unwell," Tullio said. "He says you need to come home."

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