Chapter 5
Nina smiled—a quick, sharp, victorious flash of white teeth. “Good boy. I’ll order the midday labs.”
She brushed past him, her canvas tote swinging at her hip, and opened the door. Before she stepped into the corridor, she looked back over her shoulder.
“And Luca?”
He looked at her.
“The biscotti was stale. Tell D’Agostino to bake fresh next time.”
She was gone before he could reply.
Behind him, from the hospital bed, Tommy let out a wheezing, incredulous laugh. “Uncle Luca… who the hell is that?”
Luca stared at the empty doorway, his hand reaching unconsciously into his coat pocket, where three more wrapped pastries sat untouched.
“A problem,” Luca muttered. But there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there in six years—a spark of warmth that felt perilously close to hope.
Two weeks passed.
Tommy Moretti was discharged on Friday as Nina had demanded, walking out on his own two feet under the watchful eyes of a heavily armed private convoy. The tension on the seventh floor dissolved. The suits vanished. Lakefront Mercy returned to its normal, chaotic rhythm of overdoses, slip-and-falls, drunken brawls, and cardiac arrests.
Nina didn't expect to see Luca again.
Men like Luca Moretti didn't belong in the daylight world of shift schedules, laundromats, and frozen dinners. They belonged in black sedans, back-room steak houses, and front-page headlines detailing federal indictments. He had paid his nephew’s hospital bill—in full, anonymously, with an additional seven-figure endowment to the pediatric trauma center—and that, she assumed, was the end of the ledger.
She was wrong.
It started with small things.
A crate of fresh citrus—blood oranges, tangelos, Meyer lemons—delivered to the ER breakroom every Tuesday morning, labeled simply: For the night shift. Eat real food.
Then, the broken streetlamp outside Nina’s apartment building over the laundromat on West Belmont was suddenly repaired by a private electrical contractor after the city had ignored three service requests for eight months.
And on rainy mornings when her double shift ended at 7:00 AM, a familiar black Cadillac Escalade would be parked half a block down from the hospital entrance, idling silently, exhaust curling into the damp autumn air.
Luca never honked. He never stepped out to wave. He simply sat behind the wheel, reading the financial papers.
The third time she saw the car, Nina stopped walking, sighed through her teeth, and marched over to the passenger side. She yanked the door open and climbed in, dropping her canvas tote between her boots.