“Taviano.” She whispered his name, horrified that she was vomiting while he was bleeding. She wasn’t that kind of woman. She could fix horrible gashes. The sensation of her body being torn apart must have been happening to him as well, and with a wound like the one he had, the traveling could only have made it worse.
He towered over her, looking down at her face, his eyes gentle. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No. I honestly don’t know. Are you? What was that? How did we get here?” She waved her hand at him. “Don’t tell me.”
She looked around, half expecting to find that they were exactly where they had just been, because if they weren’t, how had they traveled somewhere else? And why would she think that was what they had done? And she did think that. They were at a first aid station. No one was in it. She hurried over to the shelves, looking to pull out a first aid kit. She opened the one she thought would have the items they would need.
This wasn’t her first time traveling in the shadows. She’d done this before alone in her room, by accident. And she half remembered another time with Stefano and Taviano. She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t have time to process it yet.
Taviano came close to stand beside her. Just his scent drove her crazy. Masculine. So distinctive, sexy, even when it was mixed with the coppery scent of blood.
“I have to clean this wound and we have to get back to the airport immediately.”
He was all business, pulling out the items that he needed from the first aid kit. Whoever had shot at them missed her by quite a margin and had taken just a chunk of his skin from his arm. It looked like it hurt. He rummaged through the box, looking at the various threads to sew up his wounds with.
“What are you looking for?”
“Silk, it has to be silk, otherwise we’ll need to take thread from my shirt.”
In the end, that was what he did. She frowned, watching him. He was fast at it, too, as if he’d done it a million times. She took the needle from him after he’d cleaned up the blood and dosed the wound with antibiotics.
“They went after my friends, Taviano. They’re going to hurt them. I think Pia and Bianca may have gotten away, but Clariss was way behind the other two. I just left them. I ran straight to you.” She felt ashamed for leaving her friends, so much so that she concentrated on staring down at the stitches, keeping them tiny and even.
“Piccola, look at me.”
His voice was so gentle, it turned her heart over. He waited until her gaze met his. “You did exactly what I asked you to do. If they’d gotten their hands on all of you, they would have killed your friends in front of you.”
“Can you find them?”
“My first priority has to be you.”
She was watching him closely, and his blue eyes darkened and shifted for just the smallest moment, but it was enough. “You know where they’re going, don’t you?”
“Nicoletta.”
“You do, Taviano. You know. I don’t have a lot of friends. Pia and Bianca told me things tonight that made me very aware they are my friends. I’m not about to let them down. Clariss has always stood in my corner. Always. I know what those men will do to them, and so do you. Even if they weren’t my friends, I couldn’t leave them behind. I’m asking you to help me save them. I can’t live with myself or with you if we just go off and leave them and be safe back in Chicago.”
“You aren’t going to be safe in Chicago, Nicoletta. Neither are Lucia or Amo. I’ve already texted the family to get them to a safe place. The moment Benito Valdez finds out from his people here where you’ve been living, he’s going to be headed straight to Chicago, and he’s going to bring an army with him. Your friends have cell phones and IDs on them. It isn’t going to be difficult to get any information out of them about you that Benito wants.”
She hadn’t thought of that. She caught at Taviano’s arm, suddenly torn between trying to locate her friends and rushing back to help protect Lucia and Amo. “I never thought that they’d be in danger. What are we going to do?”
“One step at a time. Stefano and the others have that under control. We have to control the situation here. We need to get you back to the plane. Everyone there is on alert because, again, the girls will give up that location as well.”
She lifted her chin as sudden awareness dawned on her. “The hotel. They’ll go to the hotel. Especially if Pia and Bianca went to the hotel. That’s where they’ll go, isn’t it, Taviano?”
He sighed and slid his arm into the sleeve of his jacket. “Yes.”
“Then that’s where I’m going. And I’m going to kill Armando Lupez. You have no idea the terrible things he’s done. He deserves to die, Taviano. They rape girls so easily, young girls, destroying them even when they know the girls will take their own lives. They think women have no rights. They use us and then throw us away. They beat us and force us to do whatever they want and laugh while they do it. They force the girls to service their friends or other men for money and get them hooked on drugs so they can use them on the streets. They make them mules for carrying the drugs. These are bad men.” She made every effort to keep her voice under control, and it took effort when she wanted to scream at him to listen to her, to understand and believe her.
He put his arms around her and pulled her close. It was only when she put her head on his chest that she realized tears were running down her face. She didn’t cry. She never cried. She’d stopped doing that when she’d barely been fifteen, but once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop, and she didn’t have time to fall apart, not if she was going to save her friends. She needed to persuade Taviano that he had to help her because she couldn’t do it without him. If he thought she was too emotional, knowing him, he would take her straight to the plane and take her somewhere out of the country.
She lifted her head to look at him. “You said I never ask you for anything for myself.”
“Don’t, baby. Don’t ask this of me.”
“I have to.”
“Then I’ll get you to the plane, have Franco, our pilot, fly you the hell out of here somewhere safe and I’ll go back for your friends.”
“Not without me. I’m asking you, Taviano. This is what I’m asking. Give me this. I can do this with you. I know you and your brothers, even Emmanuelle, can do this. Let me. Teach me.”
He swore in Italian and pressed his forehead to hers. “Tesoro, this does not bode well for me for our future. If I agree to this, if we go to find your friends, Nicoletta, you have to do everything I say when I say it, just like before. That’s important. There’s no room for error. This is life or death. Do you understand me? You could die if you don’t. I could.”
She could tell by his voice he meant exactly what he said. With anyone else she might have dismissed the orders as melodramatic or a man wanting to control her or the situation, even with what was happening, but the Ferraros weren’t the type of men to cross. They said something, and you knew they meant it and spoke the truth.
She nodded. In any case, this was Taviano. For whatever reason, she would follow him to the ends of the earth.
“We don’t seek revenge because someone hurts us. We seek justice. We mete out justice. You have to learn to push emotion from your mind. It won’t be easy, but you have to do it. Can you?”