where she stood along the curb, flanked by Matteo and Gavin, police surrounding them, asking the same questions they'd asked Dante.
"Wait, it wasn't you?" Genna asked, her voice high-pitched, forced, as she addressed a uniformed officer. "I swear I thought it was. You didn't kill that guy? You sure?"
Man, she was a terrible liar.
She smiled at Dante, but it didn't last long. Her expression shifted as she clutched her stomach, doubling over in pain. She tried to straighten back up, but the second she did, her eyes rolled back and she dropped.
Matteo caught her before she hit the sidewalk.
"Genna?" Dante tried to climb off of the stretcher, but the IVs in his arms tethered him in place, tugging when he moved. Before he could yank them out, medics restrained him, pinning him against the stretcher. "You can't hold me. I know my rights!"
"Go, Dante," Gabriella begged from outside the ambulance. Not allowed to ride along, officers said, not until she'd answered their questions. Bullshit. Matteo knelt beside Genna as medics rushed to her side. "I'll meet you at the hospital."
"But—"
"I swear to God, Dante Galante, if you don't go to the hospital this time, I will end you myself. If the blood loss doesn't do it, I will."
He intended to keep arguing, but his chest burned, his head pounded, and he wanted more than anything to actually survive, so he let them take him to the hospital.
He let them triage him.
He let them assess his wound before stitching him up and pumping him full of somebody else's blood and sending him to a recovery room. No surgery needed. Fractured a rib, but hell, he'd fractured a few of those before. That was nothing new.
Give them a day, they told him, so he gave them an hour... an hour before he was sure he wasn't going to die if he skipped out.
He refused further treatment, signing their 'I'm a dumbass but promise not to sue you for it' release form before roaming the hospital, searching for Gabriella. She'd promised to meet him there, so he had no doubt she'd be around somewhere.
He spotted her after a few minutes down in the cafeteria, ordering coffee, and staggered up to her. "Can I get one of those, too?"
Gabriella looked at him with shock. "What are you doing?"
"Looking for you."
"I'm right here," she said. "Why aren't you in a bed?"
"I got released."
"Against medical advice?"
"Maybe."
She rolled her eyes, muttering under her breath as she gathered the coffees—three of them. "Idiot, I swear to God. You're seriously going to die one of these times, and what am I supposed to do then?"
Dante pulled her into his arms, damn near knocking the coffee cups out of her hands. He held her, breathing her in. Vanilla. The hospital stench surrounded them, but she smelled nothing like it. She was the calm in his storm. "Can we just get out of here?"
"Not yet. Your sister…"
"What about her?"
"She's having the baby."
Chapter Twenty-Five
You are who you choose to be.
Johnny Amaro had told Matty that once. He never forgot it. He'd been living in New Jersey, going by the last name Brazzi, when his father asked him to move back to New York. For a decade, Matty had waited for that moment, had agonized over if his father would ever welcome him back home. But Matty had just turned eighteen at the time and had been accepted to Princeton, and he'd already given up on them being a family.
And if he were being honest, he didn't feel like a Barsanti anymore.
Matty had confessed that to Johnny Amaro, expecting his uncle to lecture him about family loyalty, but that had been the man's response: you are who you choose to be. Guilt nagged at Matty for years afterward, and he eventually tried to be that person, but it wasn't him.
He'd chosen differently.
And as Matty sat beneath the blinding fluorescents in that busy hospital waiting room, he just kept wondering... who was he? If he wasn't a Barsanti, what did that make him? The name was inked on his chest, a permanent part of his body, but what the hell did being a Barsanti mean for somebody?
Sighing, Matty dropped his head down low, running his hands through his hair. The clock ticked away, torturous minutes passing where everything he knew remained in limbo. Every time a door opened, every time someone walked in, his head darted up, eyes seeking somebody, desperate for information.