Chapter 6
“You have a restraining order fetish, Moretti?” she asked, slamming the door.
Luca folded his newspaper, set it on the center console, and picked up a cardboard cup from the holder. He held it out.
“Dark roast. Two oat milks, no sugar. Scone is in the bag.”
Nina paused, her hand hovering midway to the cup. She glared at him. “How do you know how I take my coffee?”
“Gus watched you buy it twice at the corner diner on Lincoln.”
“You’re having me followed?”
“I’m having you watched,” Luca corrected smoothly, putting the car into gear and pulling into the morning traffic. “There’s a distinction. Following is for targets. Watching is for assets.”
“I’m not an asset, you arrogant mobster,” Nina said, taking a sip anyway. The coffee was scalding, rich, and entirely superior to the battery acid brewed in the hospital staff lounge. She let out a small, involuntary groan of satisfaction. “I’m a registered nurse. And you have no business sitting outside my workplace like an over-caffeinated bodyguard.”
“Valenti’s people know Tommy was saved at Lakefront,” Luca said. The conversational tone vanished, replaced by that low, gravelly chill. “They know the surgical team. They know the nurses who managed the floor. I don't leave loose ends, Nina. And I don't let people who protected my family pay for my debts.”
Nina chewed on the edge of her warm blueberry scone, her eyes narrowing as she looked at his profile.
“You think they’d come after me?”
“They’re desperate. When men like Marco Valenti lose three million dollars of territory in forty-eight hours, they stop acting like professionals and start acting like rabid dogs. Until the situation is resolved, Gus or Matteo will be within sixty yards of you at all times.”
“I can take care of myself,” Nina said. “I grew up in Bridgeport, Luca. My dad taught me how to use a tire iron before he taught me how to parallel park.”
Luca glanced at her hands, resting on the brown paper bag. Small hands, scrubbed clean, the nails short and practical, a faint scar on the left index finger from an ampoule that had shattered three winters ago.
“A tire iron doesn't stop a 9mm round through a windshield,” he said quietly.
The car fell silent.
Nina looked at the empty space between them, at the polished leather of the dashboard, and then down at her seat. She remembered what Gus had said that first night outside the emergency doors: That was Sophie’s seat.