Chapter 3 - Blood and Betrayal
The fourth floor of St. Jude’s Private Pavilion looked less like a hospital and more like a fortress under siege.
Four black-clad men with ear pieces stood outside the double doors of the Intensive Care Unit. The entire wing had been cleared of non-critical patients within thirty minutes of Dominic Romano’s helicopter touching down on the hospital roof. Inside Room 402, monitors hummed and hissed, bathing Antonio Romano’s unconscious face in an eerie blue light.
Emily sat in a vinyl chair in the corner of the room, clutching a warm paper cup of chamomile tea that one of Dominic’s guards had brought her an hour ago. She hadn't touched it.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the frantic, terrified look in Antonio’s eyes as he tapped on the armrest of his wheelchair. She saw the dust on his communication tablet.
The door hissed open, and Dr. Mercer stepped inside. The silver-haired physician looked exhausted, his scrub shirt stained with antiseptic, his glasses pushed up into his receding hairline.
Dominic rose from the window sill where he had been standing motionless for two hours. "Tell me."
Dr. Mercer glanced nervously at Emily, then back at Dominic. "She was right, Dominic. God help us, she was right."
Dominic’s jaw clenched so tightly the muscles in his cheek twitched. "Explain."
"Your father’s serum digoxin level was four-point-eight nanograms per milliliter. A normal therapeutic level is zero-point-eight. Anything above two is considered life-threatening toxicity. At four-point-eight, his heart was firing sporadically. If the paramedics had pushed the standard antiarrhythmic drug they routinely use for irregular rhythms, his heart would have locked into total asystole within thirty seconds."
Dr. Mercer wiped his forehead with the back of his forearm. "We gave him DigiFab—the digitalis antidote. We managed to bind the excess drug before his kidneys shut down completely. He’s stable, Dominic. But it wasn't an accident."
"How long?" Dominic asked, his voice deathly low.
"The blood work shows chronic elevation," Mercer said quietly. "Someone has been giving him micro-doses above his prescribed limit for at least four months. Just enough to cause extreme fatigue, visual disturbances, confusion, and nausea. The classic signs of advanced vascular dementia."
Mercer looked at Antonio’s motionless body. "Dominic... your father doesn't have late-stage dementia. He had a moderate stroke eleven months ago, yes. But the profound cognitive decline everyone reported over the summer? The wandering? The inability to speak or recognize faces?"
"It was the poison," Emily whispered from the corner.
Dr. Mercer nodded gravely. "It was the poison. Someone was slowly, methodically drowning his brain in toxic doses of medication, making him appear completely incompetent to any outside observer."
Dominic didn't move. He stood looking down at his father’s pale, wrinkled face.
For the past eight months, Dominic had shouldered the entirety of the Romano syndicate’s vast empire—an empire spanning multi-million-dollar maritime logistics hubs, real estate developments along the Hudson, and underground enforcement networks that kept the city's predatory families at bay. He had believed his father was slipping away into the fog of old age.
He had signed powers of attorney. He had allowed Victoria to hire private nurses. He had allowed Victoria to manage the estate’s domestic affairs because he was working eighteen hours a day defending their borders against rivals who smelled weakness in Antonio's decline.
*And all the while, my father was trapped inside his own skull,* Dominic thought, the rage inside him turning cold and lethal. *Watching the woman I brought into his home feed him poison with a spoon.*
The door clicked open again. Marco stepped in, carrying a military-grade laptop and a black Pelican case.
"Boss," Marco said, nodding curtly toward Emily before addressing Dominic. "Our tech team bypassed the encryption on the tablet we pulled from the cabinet."
Dominic stepped away from the bed. "What’s on it?"
"Voice memos. Dictation files. Your father was using the tablet’s offline accessibility microphone to record his thoughts before they took it away from him four months ago." Marco opened the laptop. "The last entry was saved on September fourteenth. The day before he was declared legally incompetent by the surrogate court."
"Play it," Dominic said.
Marco tapped a key. A burst of static hissed through the laptop speakers, followed by a long, painful breath.
Then came Antonio’s voice.
It was slurred, dragging heavily on the consonants, but the razor-sharp intellect of the man who had ruled the five boroughs for thirty years was unmistakable.
*"Dominic..."* the recording whispered. *"If you are listening to this... I have failed to stop them. They know I found the shell accounts in Cyprus. Victoria isn't working for herself. She is taking twenty percent off the top of the port redevelopments, but she doesn't have the brains to forge my corporate seals."*
The old man coughed—a wet, painful sound that made Emily press her hand against her mouth.
*"Someone inside our house is giving her the codes. Someone who knows where the offshore deeds are buried. Dominic... look at Julian. Look at Julian Vance. He signed the asset transfer for the Brooklyn piers while I was in the recovery room after my stroke. They are making me look crazy so you sign the conservatorship. Once you sign... they will kill me, and they will take the ports. Don't trust her, Dominic. Don't trust—"*
The recording ended abruptly with the sound of a door handle rattling and a woman’s muffled voice saying, *Where did you hide that machine, you old bastard?*
Silence dropped over Room 402 like a burial shroud.
Julian Vance was Dominic’s second-in-command. His chief financial officer. The man whose father had served Antonio for forty years. The man who sat at Dominic’s right hand at every board meeting, every closed-door sit-down, every family dinner.
"Marco," Dominic said. His voice was so quiet it was terrifying.
"Yes, Boss?"
"Where is Julian right now?"
"He’s at the Manhattan corporate headquarters on Lexington," Marco answered. "He’s preparing the emergency proxy paperwork for the emergency board vote scheduled for tomorrow morning at nine. The vote to liquidate the Brooklyn piers."
Dominic looked over at Emily.
She was trembling, her hands folded tightly over her stomach. She looked small, utterly defenseless against the storm of blood and betrayal that was about to rip through New York City.
"Emily," Dominic said.
She lifted her head, her green eyes shimmering with unshed tears. "Yes, Mr. Romano?"
"How much does your mother owe that hospital in Albany?"
Emily blinked, caught completely off guard. "What?"
"Her bills. How much are they?"
"I... forty-eight thousand dollars for the surgery," Emily stuttered. "And twelve hundred a week for the physical rehabilitation bed. I have about four hundred dollars in my checking account."
Dominic reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a gold Montblanc pen, and took a business card from his wallet. He scribbled a private phone number on the back and handed it to Marco.
"Call our medical liaison in Albany," Dominic instructed. "Pay the hospital forty-eight thousand in cash before midnight. Transfer Margaret Carter into a private VIP suite on the fifth floor of Albany Medical. Put two armed guards on her door. If a nurse so much as brings her a cup of water, I want the seal inspected by our people first."
Emily gasped, rising from her chair so fast her knees buckled. "Mr. Romano... no. You don't have to do that! I didn't tell you about his medicine for money! I did it because he was dying!"
Dominic stepped across the room until he was standing directly in front of her.
He was nearly a foot taller, his broad frame casting a shadow over her, but his eyes were no longer cold. They were intensely focused, reading every line of pain, exhaustion, and decency written across her face.
"You saved my father’s life, Emily Carter," Dominic said, his voice husky and low. "In my world, loyalty is bought with millions, and it usually turns out to be worthless anyway. You had forty-three dollars in your purse, a baby on the way, and every reason to mind your own business. Yet you stood between my father and a woman who could have had you destroyed."
He raised a hand and, with surprising gentleness, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
"You don't owe anyone forty-eight thousand dollars anymore. In fact, from this moment on, nobody in this city touches you, your mother, or that child without answering to me."
Before Emily could speak, the heart monitor beside Antonio’s bed gave a sharp, sudden beep.
Antonio’s eyes fluttered open.
His dark, weathered gaze scanned the ceiling, moved past the IV lines, and settled straight onto Dominic.
Then, with an effort that made the veins stand out on his temples, Antonio shifted his gaze to Emily.
His lips moved. A single, hoarse syllable pushed past his dry tongue.
"G... Grace."
Emily’s breath caught in her throat.
May you like
The old man had remembered the name of her unborn daughter.
***
