Chapter 2 - Gino’s Defiance and the Midnight Text
“Take her to Lexington Clinic,” Matteo commanded without lifting his eyes from his amber glass. “Dr. Colton is expecting you.” Gino stared at his boss, his stomach twisting into a knot of burning revulsion. “What happened?” Gino demanded, stepping closer. Matteo slowly lifted his cold, dead eyes, letting the heavy silence stretch between them like a razor blade. “She fell,” Matteo stated flatly. Gino looked around the impeccably designed, single-level penthouse, noting the complete absence of architectural hazards. “There aren’t any stairs in this apartment, boss.” Matteo took a slow, deliberate sip of bourbon. “Then she fell against the kitchen island.”
Gino understood the implicit death threat wrapped inside those words. He walked over, knelt down, and carefully scooped Elena into his arms. She felt frighteningly light and fragile, save for the warm, heavy, kicking weight of the unborn baby resting between them. Hot blood instantly soaked through the fabric of Gino’s sleeve, dampening his arm and firing a surge of fury through his veins. His jaw tightened until the bone ached. “What do I tell the doctor?” Gino asked, his voice trembling with suppressed rage. “The truth,” Matteo replied coldly. Gino looked at him, searching for a shred of humanity. Matteo offered a thin, sadistic smile that reached neither of his eyes. “Tell them she had an accident.”
Twenty minutes later, behind the wheel of the tinted sedan, Gino made the most cataclysmic, dangerous decision of his entire life. He drove straight past the private, heavily guarded Moretti family clinic and kept pressing his foot down on the gas. He rushed Elena to Harbor Metropolitan Medical Center instead—a sprawling, independent public hospital where the Moretti family name carried zero weight and bought no favors. As soon as the car slammed to a halt at the emergency entrance, nurses and orderlies swarmed the vehicle with a gurney. “She’s thirty-one,” Gino blurted out, panic cracking his voice. “Seven months pregnant! She hasn’t woken up since she hit the floor!” A trauma nurse demanded, “What happened?” Gino looked through the glass sliding doors as Elena was rushed away into the bright, frantic chaos of the trauma bay, his mouth tasting like ash. “She fell,” he lied, though the words felt entirely different coming out in a real hospital. When a nurse asked for his name, Gino committed treason against his employer for the first time in eleven years: he gave his own real name instead of an alias or a Moretti corporate header. Then, he sat out in his idling car until dawn broke over the gray East River. At exactly 6:14 a.m., his phone tapped out a single text message to the one person who could protect what Matteo wanted to destroy.
