Page 35 of The Mad Don
Her eyes close, and she slumps against me.
“Lucia —”
Giovanni runs across the room, and his hand closes around my upper arm, and he shoves me away. I almost lose her deadweight before he has her, before he has both arms under her and is lowering her gently to the bed.
“What did you do?!”
His voice is not his voice. It is something underneath, something I have not heard yet.
His men are behind me. I hear two weapons, and I hear the cock of the closer one against my head. I do not turn my head.
“Calm down,” I say to him. I keep my own voice steady. “She is breathing. I just put pressure on the carotid. She’ll come back up in a minute.”
He has her on the bed. His hand is at her throat, two fingers under her jaw, finding her pulse himself. His other hand is on her cheek.
He does not turn to look at me.
“You had better pray,” he says, and his voice is the flat absence I am used to, only now there is something different within it, “that my sister is all right.”
The men behind me close in, and I feel the barrel of a gun touch the back of my head, just behind the right ear.
I slowly raise my hands.
“She’ll be all right,” I say.
He still has not looked at me.
He is bent over her, his fingers at her pulse, his other hand smoothing back her hair from her forehead with a tenderness I would not have credited him with possessing thirty seconds ago. His shoulders are shaking very slightly. He is holding himself absolutely still, and his shoulders are still shaking.
I watch the back of his head, and I watch his hand on her cheek.
I think about the man in the warehouse who had an air of insanity about him. The man in the yard who pressed a gun barrel between my thighs. That man, whoever he is, isn’t present in this room. The man in front of me is something I have never seen.
The barrel against the back of my head presses a degree harder. I keep my hands open.
If Kirill ever needs to make Giovanni Mondi stop, I know how, now.
I just spotted Giovanni Mondi’s weakness.
Chapter Ten
Yana
“How is she?” Giovanni asks the doctor.
The doctor is checking her pulse. He listens to her breathing. He shines a small light into her eyes, lifts each lid carefully, and watches the way her pupils respond. He does all of it in silence, with Giovanni standing two paces behind him. I am at the wall by the door, and the men with guns are still at my back.
The doctor looks up.
“She is fine, Don Mondi. Her vitals are steady. The pressure on the carotid was applied correctly. She will wake in a few minutes with no lasting effect.”
Giovanni’s hand is on Lucia’s wrist. He has not let go of her wrist since he laid her down. His thumb is moving in small, slow circles against the inside of it, the way you might touch a child to keep them calm in sleep.
“The episode itself,” the doctor continues, “was a severe one. Stronger than the last. The pattern is consistent with the diagnosis. She was stimulated.”
“Stimulated?” Giovanni asks
“A presence in the room she was not expecting. Unfamiliar voices.” The doctor pauses carefully. “It does not take much, Don Mondi. With patients in her condition, even gentle interruptions of routine can trigger a severe episode.”
