She Missed Work Without a Word — The Mafia Boss Found Her Broken on the Floor at Home - Movies & TV update: News, Reviews and Trending

He sat her carefully on the edge of the bed and crouched in front of her.

For a moment he just looked at her — not at the damage, though he was cataloging that too, clinical and cold, storing it — but at her. The way she was trying to hold herself together. The way her one remaining shoe was pressed flat against the floor, as if having something solid underfoot was the only thing keeping her anchored. The way she wasn’t crying, which told him she had already done that, somewhere in the hours before he arrived.

“Who did this to you?”

She looked away. “Isa.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The temperature in the room dropped two degrees.

He didn’t raise his voice. He never raised his voice.

“Tell me who did this to you.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh in another universe. “You’re going to do something terrible to him.”

“Yes. That’s why I’m not telling you.”

He studied her face. What he saw there was not fear of him, exactly. It was something more complicated — a woman who had spent time thinking about the exact consequences of this conversation and had made a calculated decision about what to withhold.

“His name,” Rhett said, “or I spend the next six hours finding it myself. Your choice which method we use.”

She was quiet for a long time. The rain hammered the window. Somewhere in the building, a television played through the wall.

“Kane,” she finally said. “Tyler Kane. We were together for eight months. It ended three weeks ago. He didn’t—” She stopped, started again. “He didn’t take it well.”

Rhett stood up. He walked to the window and stood with his back to her for a moment, looking at the alley below, which was full of rain and garbage and the absolute absence of Tyler Kane.

He was running through his own reaction, trying to understand it, because understanding it was the only way to control it. And control was the only thing standing between him and doing something that would not serve Isa at all. He had never experienced anything like the specific quality of rage currently moving through his body.

He turned around.

“You’re coming with me.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re not staying here.” He picked up the torn sleeve of her blouse between two fingers and dropped it. “You can’t stay here.”

“I have— I have a neighbor. I can—”

“You’re coming with me,” he said again.

Not a request. Not precisely an order. Something in between — the kind of statement that acknowledged she had a choice and simultaneously made clear what he thought of the alternatives.

“My estate has medical staff. You need to be examined. After that, you can make whatever decisions you want.”

She looked at him for a long time. He held the look. He was very good at holding looks; it was a tool he had developed young and never stopped using. But this one cost him something he couldn’t quantify.

“I don’t want your charity,” she said.

“It isn’t charity. You work for me. You’re injured. This is logistics.”

Something shifted in her expression. Not quite a smile — her lip was too damaged for that. But the suggestion of one, brief and tired.

“Logistics,” she repeated.

“Logistics,” he said. “Get whatever you need. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

The drive to the estate took forty minutes in the rain.

Rhett sat in the back with her, which he almost never did. Usually the back seat was for phone calls, for the focused silence of a man who had learned to treat transit time as productive time. Tonight he sat without his phone and watched the city slide past the tinted windows and tried to understand what was happening in his own chest.

Isa sat against the opposite door, knees drawn up slightly, arms crossed over her body. She was wearing a coat he had found in her closet. He’d had to help her into it, which she’d hated, which he’d respected. She was watching the city the same way he was — not quite seeing it.

He had three medical staff on retainer at the estate. He had a suite on the second floor that had never been used by anyone. He had a security system that made military compounds look casual. She would be safe there.

That was the only thought he was allowing himself. Safe. Safe. Safe. Because the alternative thoughts — the ones circling the edge of his mind like something hungry — were not useful and were not going to help her.

“He’s done this before,” Rhett said. Not a question.

A pause. “Once. Two months ago. I left after that. He found me anyway.”

The driver, a man named Colt who had been with Rhett for nine years, showed no reaction at all. Colt had heard worse. Rhett paid him specifically for his capacity for strategic deafness.

“You didn’t tell anyone,” Rhett said.

“I told people.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

She turned her head and looked at him directly for the first time since they’d gotten in the car. Her damaged eye caught the passing streetlights and turned them amber.

“You’re my employer, Mr. Valin. Not my—” She stopped, choosing a word. “Not my person.”

He looked back at her.

“I am now,” he said.

She turned back to the window. Neither of them said anything else for the rest of the drive.

The estate occupied two acres in Lincoln Park, surrounded by a wall that didn’t look like a security installation and absolutely was one. The gate opened as the car approached and closed behind them with a weight and finality Isa seemed to notice — he saw her shoulders change slightly, a recalibration.

He had bought this place eight years ago for strategic reasons. It was defensible. It was impressive. It projected the right kind of power to people who visited for the right reasons and the wrong kind of power to people who came uninvited. He had seventeen rooms he’d never slept in. A kitchen that could feed fifty, where he usually ate alone.

He had never thought about any of that until the moment Isa walked through his front door, cradled in his arms, with blood dried on her lip and a broken expression she was working very hard not to show.

Dr. Renata Walsh was already waiting in the front hall. Marcus had called ahead. A compact woman in her fifties with the practiced calm of someone who had treated a great many things that required practiced calm, she looked at Isa, then looked at Rhett, and said nothing except:

“Let’s get you upstairs.”

Rhett carried Isa to the second-floor suite. She protested once, quietly, and he ignored it, and she seemed to decide that the amount of energy required to fight about it was more than she had available. The suite had a sitting room, a bedroom, a bathroom with a walk-in shower and a tub, and a view of the garden that was currently invisible under the rain.

He set her on the edge of the bed and straightened up.

“I’ll leave you with Dr. Walsh. She’ll examine you. You’ll have anything you ask for.”

Isa was looking at the room. He watched her look at it — the high ceiling, the clean lines, the absolute absence of chaos. She had spent some portion of today wedged between a bed and a nightstand, bleeding. Now she was here.

He wondered what that felt like. He found he very much wanted to know.

“Rhett,” she said.

It was the first time she’d used his first name. He wasn’t sure she’d noticed.

“Thank you.”

He nodded once and left the room.

But in the hallway outside, he stood with his back against the wall for sixty seconds and breathed. Then he took out his phone and called a man named Garrett, who ran his intelligence operation and who could find anything that could be found.

“Tyler Kane, Chicago,” he said. “I need everything. Address, workplace, vehicles, schedule, known associates. I need it in two hours.”

“Is this a conversation piece or a decision?” Garrett asked. This was how Garrett always asked whether the subject of the search was to be located or to be removed.