Chapter 3 - Blood on the Master's Sheets
The warmth of the service wing hit them like a wall of steam, but Ella’s skin did not respond. She remained terrifyingly limp in Luca’s arms, her breathing shallow and raspy, each inhale sounding like paper tearing inside her chest.
"Marco! Gianni!" Luca’s voice cracked through the corridor like a thunderclap, shattering the quiet of the staff quarters.
Two of his personal inner-circle enforcers, men who took orders from Luca and Luca alone, came sprinting around the corner with hands resting instinctively on their holstered weapons. When they saw their Don soaked in snow, his shirt covered in frost and blood, carrying the unconscious maid against his chest, they froze in disbelief.
"Lock down every exit," Luca snarled, storming past them up the private spiraling staircase that led to the executive penthouse suite. "Nobody leaves this house. Not a waiter, not a driver, not a Ricci. If Silvio or his daughter tries to walk toward a vehicle, put a bullet through their engine blocks."
"Boss—what happened?" Marco asked, following swiftly on his heels.
"Call Dr. Rossi. Tell him he has five minutes to get to my private quarters with advanced trauma gear and cardiac stimulants. If he isn't here, I’ll take his license and his thumbs."
Luca kicked open the double oak doors to the master bedroom—a sanctuary that no servant, mistress, or syndicate ally had ever stepped foot inside. He carried Ella past the crackling fireplace and laid her gently on the center of his massive California king bed, directly onto the eight-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets.
Her frostbitten skin immediately began to weep moisture as the room’s intense heat touched her, staining the dark gray fabric beneath her.
Luca tore off his soaked leather shoes and knelt beside the bed. With trembling hands—hands that had never shaken while holding a firearm—he began stripping off her frozen, soaking uniform. The thin black cotton was stiff as cardboard. When he carefully peeled back the torn collar, he saw the dark, ugly purple bruises shaped like fingernails around her collarbone and upper arms.
Someone had violently restrained her. Someone had beaten her before tossing her into the sub-zero night.
"Hang on, little bird," Luca whispered, his voice cracking as he reached for a stack of warm wool blankets from the armoire, piling them over her shivering body. "Stay with me. You hear me? You stay right here."
The door flew open, and Dr. Rossi stumbled into the room, out of breath and carrying two heavy medical trauma bags. The elderly mob physician took one look at the girl on the Don's bed, then at Luca’s murderous expression, and immediately dropped his briefcase onto a leather bench.
"Severe hypothermia and advanced bronchial infection," Rossi said after pressing his stethoscope to her frozen chest. "Her core temperature is below eighty-five degrees, Luca. Her heart is in ventricular fibrillation danger. If we warm her up too fast, she’ll go into cardiac arrest."
"Then do it right," Luca said, his voice dropping into a register so dark it made the doctor’s hands tremble. "Save her life, Rossi. Because if she stops breathing, nobody in this house leaves alive tonight."
Rossi immediately went to work, setting up an IV line of warmed saline solution, wrapping her extremities in thermal foil blankets, and administering adrenaline through a port. Luca never left her side. He sat on the edge of the mattress, taking Ella’s stiff, bruised right hand between his own warm palms, rubbing life back into her frozen fingers while her feverish lips parted, letting out faint, broken whimpers.
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"Please..." Ella murmured deliriously, her eyes rolling behind fluttering lids. "Please... don't hurt my father... I didn't take it... I swear I didn't steal it..."
Luca leaned down until his lips were inches from her ear. "Nobody is touching your father, Ella. And nobody will ever lay a finger on you again. I give you my word as a Ferretti."
