Page 17 of Urgent Vows
Catalina does not reply. When we reach the ballroom, her body shifts and I look down. Suddenly, she's smiling and ducking her head like a shy bride being taken away for her wedding night by a husband she adores. There are good-natured cat calls and advice offered to us both on how to spend the rest of our wedding day, and night.
My personal security team peels away from their positions in the ballroom and two of them are ahead of us by the time we reach the doors that lead to the hotel proper. Everyone thinks we are staying here in the suite on the top floor.
My team leads us past the elevators and out a side entrance to the hotel. A convoy of four cars is waiting for us. One in front of my armored SUV, one behind it and one to the side, between it and the street beyond.
I settle Catalina inside, carefully shifting her to the other side so I can climb in after her. I reach across her and pull her seatbelt toward me, and clip it into place.
Her smile is gone, and she looks away from me to stare out the tinted window.
I tell the driver to take us to the hospital instead of my home as I'd previously instructed in the text I sent.
She does not respond to that, like it does not matter. We have been driving for about five minutes in silence when she asks, "Do you have men looking for Carlotta?"
"I do."
"Will they find her before my father's men?"
"Francesco has had no opportunity to order his men to search. His cell phone was confiscated and he has had a man on him from the moment he sat down in the cathedral."
"Oh. Too bad his guard couldn't stop him from hurting me."
An unfamiliar feeling makes something inside my chest tighten. Guilt?
I do not feel guilt. No remorse. No regret. Those are emotions a don cannot allow himself to feel.
"I'm worried about her," Catalina says.
"While it is obvious she does not have the same concern for you." I can only be grateful I did not end up married to a woman who so clearly was not suited to the role of don's wife.
"Carlotta isn't great at seeing the big picture."
I do not reply.
"Did you ever wonder why my father didn't use the mafia hospital for either myself, or my mother?" Catalina asks after another beat of silence.
"Sara didn't go to a hospital that day."
"But she went other times. Once with a broken arm. Once with a fractured cheek bone. Another time when she lost the baby that would have been born two years after my sister. He was a boy. Papà killed his own heir before my brother ever had a chance to be born."
"My father would have known if that had happened," I say, appalled by her words.
"Would he? You didn't know my father sent me to the hospital two years ago with a spiral fracture in my wrist. He didn't know about the time my father broke my ribs when I was thirteen."
Her words open up a hollow place inside me. If what she is saying is true, Francesco was a serial abuser and neither my father, nor I, realized it.
"You don't believe me?" she asks, still not looking at me. "The hospital records are easy enough to check."
She's right. They would be easier to check at our mafia sanctioned private hospital, but we can get what we need from the other hospitals in New York as well.
"What happened to your mother?" I ask, no longer sure I know the answer.
Finally, Catalina's head turns so her gaze meets mine. "He hit her and she started to fall down the stairs. I was at the bottom. I ran up, trying to catch her. I was desperate to save her, but I was too small. She knocked me down and we tumbled together. She died on impact and my hip was shattered."
"Your hip?" I ask, because her father had said it was her leg.
"Yes."
I remember Francesco's grief after his wife's death, but I do what my wife said to and examine that against the way he smiled throughout their father-daughter dance.
