Lucia, who looked like she might pass out any moment, tried to stop the tears from falling, and Lisander put an arm around her shoulder.
“I knew,” Lucia sobbed. “I knew one day someone would get to her. I thought with Janek dead that she’d be safe for a little while.”
Lisander met Kate’s eye. “She’s in the best place, Lucia.”
“Where was she stabbed?”
“Belly. Multiple times. She lost a lot of blood.”
Lucia turned and threw up into her trash can. Kate rubbed her back. “Oh, sweetie.” She looked at Lisander, desperation in her eyes. “Sander … what are we going to do?”
Lisander nodded. “We wait for the others. Then we go to Maceo and hope we’re not too late.”
Florence
The surgeon rolledhis shoulders and stepped back from the table. “That’s as much as we can do until she gets stronger.”
He looked down at the beautiful woman on his operating table, her body the scene of unthinkable violence. “Who would do this to you, little one?”
“Will you update the fiancé, Dr. Gialli?”
Gialli nodded. “Let me change my scrubs. He won’t want to see her blood all over me. Take her to recovery, please, but be gentle. I don’t know if that artery will hold. And if it bursts then she won’t stand a chance.”
Gialli scrubbed out and went to find Maceo Bartoli. The young man looked like a zombie. “Mr. Bartoli?”
Maceo scrambled to his feet, his eyes searching the doctor’s face. “Dr. Gialli? Please, tell me she’s okay.”
Gialli steered Maceo into a seat. “Mr. Bartoli, I have stabilized Ms. Roy as best as we can, but she’s not out of the woods yet. She lost almost half her blood volume, which is normally fatal, but I think the blood loss was slowed by the fact that she was motionless when she was stabbed, and you applied pressure nearly as soon as the incident happened. The medics who came to the scene started the blood bag, so I think that’s what saved her.”
Maceo was listening intently, but when the doctor paused, he stared down at his hands, dyed dark red with Ori’s blood. He remembered the seconds after he’d realized she’d been stabbed, screaming, screaming for help, his hands automatically pressing down on her belly, desperate to keep the precious blood inside her. Her stillness …
“Doctor, be completely honest. Will she live?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bartoli, and that is the truth. We’ll know more in the next few days. Have the police talked to you?”
Maceo nodded. “They say they have CCTV from the gas station and are going through it now. Whoever stabbed Ori must have been following us.”
The doctor frowned. “It wasn’t a robbery?”
Maceo shook his head. “No. Someone has been threatening her for months. I promised her I’d protect her, and I failed her.”
The doctor didn’t know how to reassure the devastated young man. He patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “I’ll come find you when I know more.”
“Can I see her?”
The doctor hesitated. “She’s in the ICU at the moment. I’d rather you wait, but if you insist …”
Maceo nodded. “Whatever you think is best for Ori, doctor.”
“Then perhaps you’ll forgive me if I ask you to wait for a while—at least until we have her settled and she’s stabilized...”
“Okay. Thanks, doctor.”
The doctor nodded and walked slowly back to his office. Why did these cases always get to him? The violence, the cruelty of it all.
When he went home that night, he hugged his wife even tighter than usual.
She was hovering on the edge of death. Ori knew that and yet she wasn’t scared. She could feel people’s hands on her body, could feel the excruciating pain of the knife wounds, but everything else was numb. Blood loss, she supposed. I’m dying. She could accept that if it hadn’t been for Maceo. His grief had echoed through her unconscious mind, him begging her to live. I will try, my love …
