The Groom (20 page)

“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Draco snarled, eyebrows raised. “You choose now to get high?”

“It’s my medication, finocchio!
Mind your business.”

“Maybe you get this guy to check
you out while we’re here,” Draco said with a chuckle and a nod in his Lyle’s
direction.

Felicio snorted. “I don’t need no
fucking doctor,” he said with a shrug. “I take my magic heart pills, and that’s
enough to keep Mama off my back. Don’t you start on me too.”

Katrina watched Lyle as he
worked, her gut tightening as he paused, glancing at Felicio out of the corner
of his eyes. Draco noticed his hesitation as well and Katrina’s breath caught
in her throat as he stood, glaring at Lyle.

“What’s your problem, Doc? Can’t
you fix him?”

Lyle cleared his throat. “Of
course. It’s just . . . I have to give him a shot, to numb him. Otherwise, when
I go in to get the bullet it’s going to hurt and he’ll probably scream. I’m
going to need someone to hold him down while I do it. It’s not going to be
fun.”

Draco removed his jacket, careful
to leave his gun in Felicio’s capable hands. “Keep one pointed at the Giordano
bitch,” he said as he joined Lyle on the other side of the table. “It’s the
only thing keeping her dogs on their leashes.”

The two silent soldiers standing
along the room’s perimeter sneered, their weapons ready, their eyes sharp.
Katrina watched, careful not to move too suddenly and give Felicio the wrong
idea, as Lyle slipped a slim, black pouch from inside his bag. He unfolded the
pouch and removed two black cylinders. He removed the top of each cylinder to
reveal the gleaming needles inside.

“Do you really need both of
those?” Draco asked, eyeing Lyle suspiciously.

Lyle shrugged nonchalantly. “He’s
a big guy, it may take more than one dose to do the trick. Now, hold him down
and clap your hand over his mouth if you have to. I’ve got to inject this
pretty close to the entry wound, and it’s not going to feel good.”

Draco obeyed and pressed his body
weight down on Scarface’s upper body, lowering his head as he clapped a hand
over his brother’s mouth. “Ready,” he said once in position.

Lyle glanced up at her and then
Felicio, before looking back at her again, needle poised just inches above
Scarface’s shoulder. Katrina’s eyes widened as she realized his intent, her
heart hammering in her chest as every muscle in her body coiled in
anticipation. Even as she cheered him on in her heart, in her mind she screamed
over and over again for him to stop. The words were in her eyes and on the tip
of her tongue.
Lyle, no!

Yet, before she could voice them,
Lyle was on his feet and over the coffee table, using Draco’s back as a
springboard as he lunged at Felicio. The two syringes in his hand plunged into
Felicio’s neck, and as the pistols fell from his hands, Lyle pressed the
plungers on the syringes swiftly.

What happened next was a blur.
Draco was on his feet and lunging for one of the guns as Katrina dove for the
other. Scarface found the strength to rise, despite his injured shoulder, and
reached for his own gun. Alessandro’s crew opened fire and Lucca appeared from
out in the hall. Katrina leveled her gun at Draco just as he took aim for Lyle,
who was rolling from on top of Felicio’s unmoving body. She didn’t hesitate.
The trigger gave way beneath her squeezing finger just as Scarface leveled his
gun at her. She smiled in satisfaction as blood blossomed at Draco’s back
before he could shoot Lyle. He fell at her feet, glassy eyes still wide with
surprise as Lucca put a bullet between Scarface’s eyes.

She turned toward Lyle, her smile
still wide as she realized he’d escaped unscathed. “Lyle,” she whispered as the
gun fell from her fingers. Her legs were weak and her vision was swimming
before her eyes as he raced across the room toward her.

“Katrina!”

He caught her just as she
collapsed, her legs now ceasing to function. She couldn’t understand why he
looked so upset, or why his lips were moving and she could no longer hear his
voice. Lucca’s concerned face appeared behind his in her field of vision, which
was rapidly growing hazier. It wasn’t until just before she lost consciousness
that she registered the sticky feeling of hot liquid gushing from just beneath
her left breast and the coppery smell of blood.

_________

“LYLE,
STEP AWAY from the table.”

Lyle stood, his hand holding the
scalpel inches from Katrina’s chest. Tears flooded his vision, but he blinked
them away and stilled his shaking fingers, forcing himself to focus.

Don’t let her die. You can
save her.

His own voice resonated in his
head as he stared down at her, stretched out on a surgical table with a tube
down her throat. It was breathing for her, but he didn’t have a lot of time to
get in there and stop the bleeding.

“Lyle, listen to me. You are in
no shape to do this. Step away and let me help her.”

Lyle looked up, staring
unseeingly at Dan, who was on the other side of the table. He’d met Lyle at the
Emergency Room doors after Lyle’s hasty phone call. There hadn’t been much time
to explain anything. He’d merely told Dan that Katrina had been shot and to
prep an OR. He didn’t care if it was occupied, if there was someone else there
who needed it. They would simply have to wait because no life was more
important to him at that moment than hers.

He could not lose her.

He’d raced to the scrub room to
prepare for surgery as Dan and Dr. Thomas worked to keep her alive long enough
to get her to the OR. And now he stood, poised to cut, determined to save her
life.

“I can do it,” Lyle said, his
voice injected with a sense of confidence he did not feel. “I can do it, Dan. I
have to save her.”

Dan’s hand gripped his wrist and
his cool blue eyes bored into Lyle’s from across the table. “Officially, I
can’t stop you,” he said softly. “I could if she were your wife, but she’s not.
She’s not family so I can’t pull that card. As the head of the department, you
exercise the right to operate on her, and if you say you can do it, I won’t try
to stop you.”

Lyle shuddered as he glanced down
at her, his throat constricting as he noticed how ashen her face appeared.

“But Lyle,” Dan continued, “look
at your hands. They’re shaking. Even with all that going on, I know you could
get past it, and you could do this if you really put your mind to it. Because
you’re just that damned good. Everyone here knows it, Lyle. But you cut, and
you are putting her life at risk, and if she dies, you’ll never forgive
yourself. As your friend, I can’t let you take that risk. Give me the
responsibility. That way, if something goes wrong, you can hate me forever
instead of hating yourself.”

Lyle took a deep breath, glancing
back up at Dan. He was wrong, absolutely wrong. Lyle could not do this. And he
wouldn’t. He allowed his hand to go slack, dropping the scalpel into Dan’s open
palm. Dan breathed a sigh of relief.

“Okay, good call. Now get the
hell out of my OR. Don’t let me see your face in the gallery either. Get your
ass in the waiting room and wait like all the other friends and family members.
Get a cup of coffee, call whomever you need to call—maybe Katrina’s
friends at the bar? I’ll send word when I have something to tell you.”

Somehow, Lyle made it to the
scrub room, but he couldn’t quite remember making his feet move to get him
there. Yet, there he stood, staring through the plate-glass window as Dan
deftly went about operating. He knew that he shouldn’t stay. Angie and Jake
should know what was going on. According to Katrina, they were her true family.
They would want to be here. Yet, he couldn’t force his feet to move.

At his apartment, Lucca and his
cohorts were . . . well, Lyle wasn’t sure exactly what they were doing, and he
didn’t much care. Eventually, the police would make their way here and Lyle
would have some explaining to do. Just then, he didn’t care. Nothing mattered
outside of this room and what lay beyond the window.

For hours he stood, watching, his
lips moving as he whispered each step of the surgery out loud as Dan performed
it, finding comfort in the familiar. It wasn’t until Dan appeared in the scrub
room entrance, his mask and scrub cap removed, the last suture stitched, that
Lyle realized it was over. In the OR, Katrina was being prepared to move to a
room in the Cardio wing. Lyle’s vision blurred as fatigue washed over him and
he went limp. Dan caught him, looping his arm over his shoulders and guiding
him from the room.

When he awoke hours later, he was
stretched out on a bed in a double room next to another patient. When he rose
to part the curtain separating the two beds, he sighed with relief to find
Katrina, the tube absent from her mouth and her chest rising and falling
slowly. He checked her vitals with tears in his eyes before bending down to
kiss her forehead, his body numb with relief. With the first rays of sunrise
peeking through the blinds, Lyle climbed onto the bed beside her, careful not
to disturb any of the tubes attaching her to machinery and the IV bag and morphine
drip beside the bed. He gingerly took her into his arms, laid his head on the
pillow beside her and closed his eyes.

_____

The days that followed passed
Lyle in a blur. Katrina slept through most of it, and Lyle was grateful. He had
a feeling that when she was finally completely coherent, the impact of
Alessandro’s death and all that had happened would hit her, hard. He steeled
himself, ready to be there for her when it happened. Lyle still didn’t know
what Lucca and his boys had done, but when he went back to his apartment the
day after Katrina’ surgery for a quick shower and shave, it appeared as if
nothing had happened. There wasn’t even a single drop of blood on the rug.

Even the epinephrine syringes
he’d used on Felicio had been discarded. Injecting it into Felicio had been a
gamble, but when he’d hinted at a possible heart condition, he had been
confident that taking the chance would pay off. Injected into a person having
an anaphylactic seizure because of allergies, could save their life. In a person
with no symptoms, it would simply make them wired for a bit as epinephrine was
a form of adrenaline. But in a person with an underlying heart condition, it
could cause cardiac arrest, which is exactly what had happened to Felicio. As
much as Lyle wanted to muster up pity for the man he’d killed, he found it
damned hard. It had been him or Katrina, and Lyle would make the decision again
in a heartbeat, no hesitation.

When the police arrived to
investigate Katrina’s gunshot wound, which had been reported by the hospital,
Lyle had remained as calm and collected as possible. It was agreed that he
would tell the cops he and Katrina had been mugged. The police would think
Alessandro a hero, who had taken a bullet to save his friends while trying to
fight off a thief. That they’d made off with Felicio’s body and cleaned behind
themselves so well made the story feasible enough. The NYPD, who didn’t have
time to go investigating every mugging that happened, made halfhearted promises
to try to find the man responsible before leaving.

They didn’t return.

Jake and Angie came in shifts,
joining him and sitting vigil at Katrina’s bedside. They often encouraged him
to go home and rest, promising to look after her in his absence, but he refused
to leave her side. He practically lived in her room, ignoring the stone-faced
Italians who arrived like clockwork each day, taking shifts guarding the door.
Lyle and the hospital staff pretended not to notice them, but the whispers
about who Katrina could be and why she needed armed guards were all over the
hospital.

When she finally came to, five
days after her surgery, Lyle had never been more relieved.

_____

When Katrina finally floated up
out of the morphine haze that had held her captive for five days, she breathed
a heavy sigh of relief. After quitting heroine, she’d promised herself that a
needle would never again rule her life. While she knew the morphine was to keep
her from feeling pain, she couldn’t say it had been worth it. A drug-induced
haze inflicted with the ghosts of her past was far worse than any physical pain
she could have felt. Watching the grotesque, distorted faces of her mother,
brother, and Alessandro floating in and out of her dreams as if haunting her
were not going to be easy to forget. The incident in Lyle’s penthouse would
replay itself in her mind over and over again, every word and every action
standing out in stunning discordance to the lazy, indolent feeling keeping her
motionless in a hospital bed. Even as her mind fought for freedom against captivity,
her body remained a slave.

The white, fluorescent lights
above her called her out of the haze, and she floated upward, faintly aware of
the steady beep of a heart monitor keeping track of the steady rhythm beating
in her chest. She blinked and swallowed, cringing to find her mouth and throat
dry. She tried to move, but decided against it when pain exploded in her chest.
The feeling of the two halves of her cracked sternum rubbing together nearly
caused her to black out as the skin around her surgical scar pulled
rebelliously beneath a clean bandage. Katrina choked down vomit as stars swam
behind her closed eyes, gulping deep breaths as she waited for the pain to ebb.
It never completely left, but once the acute sharpness retreated, she was able
to open her eyes.

She found Lyle at her side, paper
cup brimming with water, his tired eyes searching her face as he placed his
free hand on top of her head tenderly.

“Hey you,” he whispered as he
held the cup to her lips. “Welcome to the land of the living.”

She gulped at the water greedily,
grateful for its cooling effect on her throat. She smiled as he set the cup
aside and used the buttons on the side of the bed to shift her into a seated
position as opposed to a reclined one.

“How long has it been?” she asked,
her eyes darting around the room as she struggled to get her bearings.
Everything after the flurry of gunshots was such a blur. She faintly recalled
coming in and out of consciousness as Lyle raced her to the hospital. The last
thing she remembered before anesthesia took her away was Lyle’s tear-brimmed
eyes as he begged her to hold on and promised to save her. “Did you operate on
me?”

Lyle’s expression was grim behind
his glasses as he ran a hand through his hair. He looked exhausted, and Katrina
could tell he’d hardly slept. Guilt stabbed through her as he reached out to
grab her hand. This whole thing had been her fault.

“I wanted to,” he admitted,
lowering himself onto the edge of her bed, careful not to jostle her or her IV.
“But Dan was there to step in. It would have been a mistake for me to try, Kat.
I was pretty shaken when I thought I might lose you. You had a collapsed lung,
which was an easy fix, and Dan repaired damage to one of your ventricles and
inferior vena cava. He did everything right, exactly the way I would have. It
was a beautiful surgery, and you’re going to be just fine.”

Silence fell between them as she
digested this information. After a while she spoke again. “Sandro . . .” she
trailed off, a lump rising hard and fast in her throat.

Lyle sighed. “I’m not sure,” he
said. “The police found his body and we—Lucca and I—told the police
that we were mugged. They think Sandro died trying to defend us, and Lucca was
a witness on the street. Lucca cleaned up the apartment and got rid of the
evidence . . . though I’m guessing at this point both sides of this stupid turf
war know about the casualties. I can’t imagine things will get any easier from
here.”

Katrina nodded slowly, avoiding
his gaze. Victor was sure to be furious, and the repercussions for the Pirellis
would be severe. Which meant this thing was about to escalate even more with
her caught in the middle. And now Lyle was involved and knowing that brought
her even more pain than her aching chest. He’d killed and almost been killed because
of her.

 
“About the other night,” he said softly,
his fingers tightening around hers. “We should talk about it.”

Katrina shook her head. “I’m so
sorry,” she croaked, her shoulders shaking with unshed tears and restrained
sobs. “I put you in danger, I brought this into your life. I can never forgive
myself for that.”

“Don’t do that,” he said. “If it
weren’t for you I don’t think I could have gotten past . . . hell, none of the
crap that’s happened to me the past couple of months. You were there for me,
Katrina, even when you didn’t know I was depending on you and your voice. Let
me be here for you now. Losing Sandro had to be hard. I know how you felt about
him.”

“People who love me end up dead,”
she whispered, pulling her hand from his grasp. She heard his sharp intake of
breath and knew that she’d hurt him by pulling away. It hadn’t been easy for
her either.

“He didn’t die because he loved
you, Kat, he died because of the lifestyle he lead.”

 
“I meant what I said the other night,
Lyle,” she said as if he hadn’t even spoken. “You should get away while you
still can. I couldn’t bear to lose you too. I was selfish before, thinking I
could hold on to you and everything would be all right. But you came too close
. . . I can’t do that to you. It’s over, Lyle.”

She heard him stand, and in a
second he was rounding the bed, forcing her to look at him through tear-filled
eyes. His face was carved in raw, naked pain. “Don’t do this,” he warned, his
mouth going tight at the corners. “You can’t . . . you can’t just give me
everything and then take it away, Kat. I need you. I—”