The Enforcer (Untamed Hearts Book 3)(41)

In a way he felt like he’d earned it.

The hard way.

Except Tino’s eyes flew opened when the pain came back and slammed into him like a Mack truck. He sucked in a hard gasp of air from the shock of it, but then he was choking. His entire mouth tasted terrible and chalky, and he turned his head, spitting something out at the same time he let out a scream.

“Fuck. Shh.” Nova grabbed his face, forcing Tino to turn toward him. “Be quiet. I know it hurts, but you have to be quiet. I want you to stay awake, but you need to be quiet for me, okay?”

Tino used to have this natural tendency to do whatever Nova told him to if the cards were down. If he was in danger, he trusted Nova implicitly to get him out of the shit.

He was pretty sure he’d never been in more trouble than he was right now, and Tino trusted Nova exactly zero to save him.

But he stopped screaming and just cried.

The pain was all-consuming, ripping him up from the inside out. His head was resting on Nova’s lap, but he couldn’t stop moving, writhing from the agony, wanting to somehow crawl out of his skin and get away from it.

Tino wasn’t really awake.

He wasn’t present in that shower stall.

He remembered bits and pieces of those first few moments after he woke. The glow of the light in the bathroom. The blood that was everywhere. All over Nova, all over Tino, sticky on his skin and crusty in his hair. He wore only a pair of black boxer briefs, but even those were agony. He felt like his entire body had turned against him.

Mostly he remembered absolutely hating Nova.

Even completely mindless from the pain, he knew Nova’s f*cking pride caused this, knew that his brother was so caught up with being smarter than everyone else that he let this happen. Now Nova forced Tino back into this hellhole, made him wake up to this nightmare when he could’ve let him die instead.

Tino hated him even as he rolled on his side and curled into Nova to keep the pressure off his back and let him caress his hair. He wanted it to be Romeo here with him.

Or Ma.

Or anyone but Nova.

What he didn’t remember, but he found out later haunted Nova most intensely, was that Tino told him all of this in choked sobs as he lay there and worked really hard at bleeding to death.

But Sicilians, they’re hard to kill.

And like rats, they’re stronger in packs.

“Tino?”

“Get out. Get out. Get out,” Nova growled, his voice echoing off the tiles. “Get out! They’ll find you here! Get out!”

“They’re gone. Ma’s asleep,” Carina whispered from the other room. “Why is he crying? Can I help?”

“Are you a f*cking doctor? Do you have a medical license?”

“I have a first-aid kit.”

“A first-aid kit,” Nova repeated manically. “I need so much more than a first-aid kit to fix this, sweetheart. He’s dying. Get out.”

The thing about Carina was, she didn’t take direction too well.

She was pretty much on her own agenda most of the time.

She also had balls the size of Texas.

Tino heard the bathroom door click open, as Nova cursed in Italian and then whispered again, almost desperately, “Please get out. Don’t see him like this.”

Tino turned his head on Nova’s thigh, blinking past the agony, and saw Carina kneeling there in her nightgown, as if she had fallen when she walked in. Her hands were over her mouth, and silent tears were rolling down her cheeks as she stared at them.

“I-I lost the pill,” Nova finally said to her. “I had it under his tongue, but he spit it out. I can’t find it. He needs another one. Can you get it off the counter?”

“Yeah, I can get it.” Carina got to her feet. “He needs water.” When she came back with a glass from the kitchen, she asked, “Should we turn on the shower? There’s so much blood. It’s so much. I’ve never seen this much.”

“I think that would be incredibly painful for him,” Nova choked out. “If he’s gonna die, I don’t want him to hurt any more. Give him the pill.”

Nova thought Carina wasn’t a real sister.

They weren’t raised with her, so she didn’t count.

But Tino was pretty f*cking sure it took a real sister to shove a pill down his throat even though he was choking on the water.

It definitely took a real sister to pull his head onto her lap and help Nova hold Tino on his side when he puked his guts up into a dishpan.

Without fail, it took a real sister to go back to the castle across the pool, covered in Tino’s blood, and steal her mother’s stash of weed when Nova asked her if she had anything to help that wouldn’t make him sick.

Tino wasn’t a fan of smoking anything, but he would’ve shot up heroin if they told him it was going to help.

Nova was a fan of smoking, but he said he wanted a clear head. So Carina was the one who sat there in the shower stall with him, her fingers in his hair just like his ma used to do, with long strokes as she pushed the sticky strands back from his forehead.

It took a real sister to light a blunt and hold it to his lips.

But it took a cosmic twin to smoke it with him until the world finally softened around him a little, and he started to believe there was still some beauty out there somewhere.

“I have a talent,” Carina said into the darkness, because the light was bothering Tino. The tip of the blunt glowed bright, and her voice was raspy when she blew out the smoke. “You want me to show you?”