Chương 1
The first time Elena Vassallo screamed for help, the men in the emergency room kept their voices low enough that everyone else could pretend nothing was happening.
She stood beside the locked treatment-room door with blood drying beneath one nostril, her phone trapped in a stranger’s hand, and watched a security guard study the floor as if the pattern in the linoleum required his full attention.
“Give it back,” Elena said.
The man holding her phone was broad through the shoulders, clean-shaven, and dressed in a charcoal suit that looked too expensive for three in the morning.
He smiled without warmth and slipped the phone into his inside pocket.
“You’ve made enough calls tonight.”
“My brother is in there.”
“And the doctors are taking care of him.”
“You’re the reason he needs doctors.”
That made the second man move.
He had been leaning against the wall near the vending machines, pretending to read something on his own phone, but now he straightened and glanced toward the waiting room.
A woman holding a feverish toddler looked away.
An orderly pushing an empty wheelchair changed direction before reaching them.
The security guard finally lifted his head, saw Elena looking at him, and touched the radio clipped to his shoulder without speaking into it.
Elena understood then that nobody was confused.
They were afraid.
She hated herself for having taken so long to become afraid too.
“Miss Vassallo,” the man with her phone said, “you should sit down.”
She looked through the narrow glass panel in the treatment-room door.
A nurse crossed behind it carrying a stainless-steel tray, briefly exposing the bed beyond her.
Nico lay motionless under a white sheet, one side of his face swollen almost beyond recognition.
Twenty-two years old, six feet tall, unable to keep his mouth shut when he thought somebody was being bullied, and apparently still stupid enough to believe those facts added up to immortality.
Elena put her palm against the door.
The man stepped closer.
“Don’t.”
She turned.
“What are you going to do, break my hand too?”
His expression barely changed, but his eyes did.
That was enough.
Nico’s right hand had been wrapped in blood-soaked gauze when the ambulance brought him in.
The emergency physician had asked how the injury happened, and Nico, half conscious, had whispered one word before vomiting onto the floor.
Hammer.
Elena had been trying not to understand it ever since.
The elevator at the end of the corridor opened with a soft electronic chime.
Nobody came out immediately.
The man beside Elena looked toward it, and for the first time since he had taken her phone, his composure cracked.
His mouth opened slightly.
The second man pushed away from the wall.
Even the security guard stood straighter.
An elderly woman stepped from the elevator carrying a closed black umbrella although there had been no rain that night.
She was small, perhaps five foot two, dressed in a dark wool coat over a cream blouse, with silver hair cut neatly along her jaw.
No bodyguards crowded around her.
No one announced her.
She walked down the corridor with the careful, economical pace of somebody whose knees hurt and who considered that inconvenience nobody else’s business.
Elena stared at her.
For seven years, her grandmother had existed mostly as a Christmas card returned unopened, a birthday check Elena refused to cash, and a name her father could turn into an argument simply by hearing it.
Teresa Vassallo stopped ten feet away.
Her gaze went first to Elena’s bloodied face, then to the man standing beside her, then to the closed treatment-room door.
“What happened to your nose?”
Elena’s throat tightened with a fury so old it arrived before relief could.
“That’s what you ask?”
Teresa looked at her again.
“Answer me.”
“He shoved me.”
The suited man raised both hands slightly.
“Mrs. Vassallo, she was interfering with—”
“Which hand?”
He stopped.
Teresa’s voice had not risen.
That seemed to frighten him more.
“Teresa,” Elena said, deliberately refusing the word Grandma, “Nico is in there.”
“I know.”
“How?”
Teresa’s eyes settled on the treatment-room door.
“Because you called me.”
“I left a voicemail.”
“Yes.”
“At three in the morning.”
“I own a telephone at three in the morning.”
Under any other circumstances, Elena might have laughed.
Instead she felt an embarrassing pressure behind her eyes and turned toward the door before Teresa could see it.
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“I know that too.”
The suited man cleared his throat.
“We should speak somewhere private.”
Teresa finally looked at him directly.
“What’s your name?”
He hesitated.
“Anthony.”
“Anthony what?”
Another pause.
“Renda.”
Teresa gave the smallest nod.
“Give my granddaughter her phone.”
Anthony’s jaw tightened.
“She took photographs that don’t concern her.”
“They concern me,” Elena said.
Teresa did not look away from him.
“Give it back.”
“I can’t do that.”
Something subtle moved through the corridor.
The second man near the vending machines lowered his phone.
The security guard stepped backward toward the nurses’ station.
Anthony seemed to notice both reactions and resent them.
Teresa shifted her umbrella from her right hand to her left.
“Then call the man who told you that you couldn’t.”
Anthony’s face went still.
Elena looked from him to Teresa.
“You know who he works for?”
“I know the kind of man who sends somebody else to take a young woman’s phone in a hospital.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
It was the answer Teresa always gave when she intended to end a conversation without technically refusing it.
Elena remembered that much from childhood.
She also remembered her grandmother peeling apples in one unbroken spiral at the kitchen table, correcting Nico’s multiplication homework, and disappearing into the basement whenever certain men came to the house.
Her father had called those men customers.
Later, after the divorce and the move across the river, he had called them something else.
Family.
May you like
The word had never sounded affectionate.
A physician emerged from the treatment room and pulled off his gloves.
