Taken by the Italian Mafia(30)

Rocco was just glad that it hadn't happened to Whitney in his place.

It wasn't long before Whitney returned with a medical supply kit and an  extra box of gauze. Rocco remained on the kitchen stool as she'd told  him to, unwilling to move any more than necessary.

"I'm going to clean it up with some disinfectants and make sure it's all  wrapped up, and you're going to have to be careful to make sure that  wrapping doesn't get wet, okay?"

"Right," Rocco said with a curt nod of his head. It wasn't the first  time he'd heard the same. The Lombardo family doctors regaled him with  the same tale whenever shit got bad, but he was surprised to hear it  come from Whitney's lips. She knew what she was doing. "You said you  were a bartender or waitress all your life. Where's this medical  knowledge coming from? This isn't stuff I'd guess the girl behind the  counter serving me drinks would know."

"Ah, well, you'd be right," Whitney said. The clasps on the front of the  kit popped open beneath her supervision, and she took out some medical  grade disinfectant wipes sealed in sterile packaging. "I didn't learn  any of this at the bar or at a restaurant. I um, well. Does it matter  where I learned it?"

"You bet your ass it does," Rocco remarked with dry humor. "It's not  like we're talkin' about cookin' eggs here, I wanna know so I don't die  of infection or something." The Italian accent he tried to suppress in  public flowed strong and smooth. If she'd seem him kill a man and still  hadn't run, it meant she'd stick by him even if he let his tongue loose.

Dark eyes caught his blues for a moment, hesitant. With a tiny shake of her head, Whitney relented.

"Well you know how I said I was caught up and lost in the foster  program, right? How I went to family after family until I aged out of  the system?"

"Yeah." Before Whitney opened the packaging on the disinfectant, she  undid his shirt and slid it from his shoulders so his chest was bare.  The shirt had soaked up most of the blood, but the area around his  shoulder still looked gruesome. Whitney didn't flinch.

"Well, that had a really big impact on my life. I wasn't always the good  girl you're so fond of calling me, you know. When I was a teenager, I  fell in with some thugs. Back then I thought they were so cool, so edgy,  so big and organized, but really it was just a twenty-something jackass  and a bunch of his gangsta friends who thought they were all that. It  couldn't have been more than a dozen people in that group, if I had to  guess."

"Little crime rings can be bad news," Rocco remarked. Had he been able  to, he would have shrugged; the pain was too much to risk such a  gesture. "At least in organized crime you've got rules everyone follows,  and clear consequences for your actions. Petty crime doesn't have that,  and things can get ugly fast."         

     



 

"Try telling that to sixteen-year-old Whitney and see how far you get. I  thought I'd finally found a family. To me, it was like, here's this  group of guys who stick up for each other no matter what and are willing  to take the fall for one another when the situation gets bad. I thought  that it was going to give me the love I needed. I was wrong. But I  didn't come away from that experience without learning anything. I  learned about respecting myself, and, most important for right now," she  tore the packaging on the disinfectant open with her teeth and took the  cloth from inside, "it taught me about cleaning up bad wounds on the  down-low. When the boys got hurt on a robbery gone bad or a drug deal, I  was there to patch them up. Another one of the guys' girlfriends was in  school to be a nurse, and she taught me all kinds of things. And it  stuck over the years."

"But you go to a doctor to get your hand stitched up after cutting it on  a can lid?" Rocco asked, incredulous. Whitney rolled her eyes skyward  in a playful manner and shook her head. "Not because I couldn't stitch  myself up, but I don't carry tetanus vaccines around. I'm not interested  in dying a horrible death because of a can lid."

"Point taken."

The cloth touched his shoulder, cleansing the spilled blood away. As  soon as it drew near the wound, the injury started to burn. Rocco grit  his teeth and endured. Right now he had to be strong, and around  Whitney, he found himself compelled to be even stronger than usual. Pain  like this was nothing. He'd take it for her all over again if he had  to.

"So tell me about your thug boyfriend. He treat you right, or do I need to go bust his ass?"

Whitney smiled an uneasy, but satisfied smile. The pain in it was  distant, but detectable, and it made Rocco uneasy. Despite the short  length of their relationship, seeing her hurt felt like a personal blow.

"He was the type of guy he was," Whitney said. The disinfectant cleaned  the area around the wound, then traced over it. Rocco winced. "I thought  I was so in love, and he was so in love with me. I was wrong. He didn't  treat me how a man should treat a woman, and when it ended, it ended  badly. I don't think about that anymore. I'm a different person now."

Different, yet quick to slip between the sheets with one of New York's  most dangerous men. Rocco ran his tongue over his teeth as his nerves  took over. Was Whitney just in love with the idea of danger and romance,  or was she sticking by him for higher reasons? It was hard to tell. But  no matter the case, if she were to stick by his side, he'd win her over  and give her reason to stay. If a woman was able to sway his hardened  soul this much, she deserved a spot at his side. Rocco would keep her  there no matter what.

"So what I'm hearing is, if this joker comes by you again, I've gotta step up and take care of business."

"You don't really have to do anything," the words were raw and  vulnerable. Rocco opened his eyes, biting back on the stinging pain of  his wound to give Whitney his full attention. There was something  haunted about her eyes, like she'd come to realize what a terrible  situation she now found herself in. Had the shock finally worn away to  expose the good girl beneath? Was she going to run like all the others  had?

Their eyes met. Whitney hesitated, holding the disinfectant away from  his shoulder. Her lower lip trembled, but in the next moment she found  the force of will inside her self needed to stay strong. Whatever demons  she struggled against disappeared, and she smiled at him in full.  Radiant, dazzling Whitney was back again.

"...But I won't stop you from teaching a lesson to jerks from my past if that's what you want."

He smiled back. Warmth bloomed in Rocco's chest, the air between them  thick with something he hadn't felt since he was a naive young teenager  noticing women for the first time.

"You can count on it," he murmured as he reached out with his good arm to take her empty hand. "I've got your back."

"And I've got your shoulder," Whitney replied with a playful grin. "Let's get you bandaged up."

Step by step she progressed, dabbing at his wound and cleaning out  little bits of fabric from his shirt as she went. When Whitney put the  disinfectant away and pulled out a curved needle and medical grade  thread in its place, Rocco's stomach lurched.

"You're gonna sew me up?" he asked.

"Um, well yeah. Have you seen how big these wounds are? If we don't  stitch you up it won't heal. Haven't you had stitches before?" Eyes  curious, yet still lighthearted. Rocco took strength from them.

"Well, yeah, but always from some uptight looking doc in medical scrubs. Guess it just feels more official."

"So then get me a white lab coat, if it makes you feel better." Whitney  grinned. "I promise, I'm an old pro at stitches. Your doctor won't be  able to tell they aren't his."         

     



 

Doctors never made Rocco squeamish. He'd spilled enough brains that gore  wasn't an issue. So why was he so anxious around Whitney? It wasn't  because she lacked professional medical training, because Rocco had  taken help from people who knew less. He realized he hated the thought  of exposing his weakness to her, and that fear was causing him to be  weaker yet.

The only way past that fear would be to embrace it.

"Sew me up, Doc," he instructed. Whitney grinned and posed the needle near the site of the injury.

"It sounds cliché, but um, this is going to hurt a little."

But when the needle bore through his skin, there was surprisingly little  pain. One stitch drawn closed and tied off, Whitney started a second.  As she worked, Rocco forced himself to relax. If Whitney had enough  faith in him to trust him even after he'd tried to kill her, he could  trust her back. By the time she was drawing the last stitch to a close,  he looked over to examine her handiwork. It was impressive, no doctor  would be able to tell it from stitches done up in the emergency room.

"All done," Whitney announced as she drew the needle away for the final  time. "I'm going to cover it with some antibiotic ointment and then wrap  it up. You need to change the bandaging every twenty-four hours, or if  it gets wet or really dirty. I think the stitches should stay in for  about a week, but um, maybe you should get to a medical professional  before then, just in case."