He leaned in, his face inches from hers. The clean scent of cedarwood, rain, and cold tobacco rolled off him in waves.
“And I do not negotiate.”
“What about Leo?” she cried, tears finally breaking through her pride, spilling hot down her pale cheeks. “He’s sick, Victor! If he doesn’t get his morning medications, his white blood cell count will crash! He can’t survive a raid!”
Victor’s expression softened, a subtle shift in the hard planes of his jaw that made him look human for a split second. He reached into his coat pocket, retrieved a sleek black smartphone, and held it out to her.
“Call him,” Victor instructed gently.
With shaking fingers, Aliyah snatched the phone and dialed Leo’s number from memory. It rang twice before her brother’s groggy voice came through the speaker.
“Aliyah? Why are you calling from a weird number? Are you okay?”
“Leo!” Aliyah choked out, pressing the phone to her ear. “Leo, where are you? Are you at the apartment?”
“No, some fancy private ambulance picked me up an hour ago,” Leo said, his voice sounding surprisingly relaxed. “They said my specialist at Children’s approved an emergency transfer to a private recovery suite at the Brigham and Women’s research wing. Aliyah… this room has an Xbox, a private chef menu, and they already gave me my Cyclosporine dose. Did your scholarship finally come through?”
Aliyah stared at Victor.
The mafia boss sat back against the leather, his face carved from marble, watching her with silent, absolute sovereignty.
“Yeah, Leo,” Aliyah managed to whisper, her throat tightening with overwhelming, conflicting emotions. “Something like that. Stay in bed. Don’t leave that room. I’ll… I’ll see you soon.”
“Love you, Li. Don’t work too hard.”
The call clicked dead.
Aliyah lowered the phone, her hands resting in her lap. The weight of what had just happened settled over her like an avalanche. In less than two hours, her entire life had been uprooted, rewritten, and sealed behind bulletproof glass.
“Why?” she asked, looking at Victor through a veil of unshed tears. “Why move my brother? Why kill those men? Why are you doing this for me?”
Victor remained silent for a long moment. He turned his head, looking out the rain-slicked window as the Maybach crossed the Longfellow Bridge into Cambridge.
“For twelve years,” Victor murmured, his voice so quiet it barely competed with the hum of the engine, “I have felt nothing. No pain, no warmth, no desire to draw another breath beyond keeping the blood off my family’s name.”
He turned back to her, his pale eyes burning with an ancient, terrifying hunger.
“When you fell against my chest tonight… when your blood touched my skin… I felt my heart beat for the first time since they put Elena in the ground.”
