[COMPLETED] The Ring Dominic Rossi Put on My Sleeping Hand

“Take it off.”

My voice was barely louder than the oxygen hissing beneath my nose, but Dominic heard me.

His eyes dropped to the gold band on my finger.

“Lena—”

“Take it off.”

Isabella stood first. “Dominic, give us a minute.”

“No.” I turned my head toward her, and even that movement sent a bright line of pain through my ribs. “Please stay. I want witnesses.”

Something like approval flickered across her face.

Dominic moved closer to the bed, stopping well outside my reach. “It isn’t a legal marriage.”

I stared at him.

“That is your defense?”

“It was a declaration of protection.”

“To whom?”

“People who understand the Rossi name.”

My mother made a small, furious sound from the chair.

I looked at her. “Mom, what did he tell you?”

“That you were hurt. That I was being brought here. Then a man with an earpiece moved me into a private cardiac room and refused to let me pay for anything.”

Her eyes cut to Dominic. “I assumed he was either an angel or a criminal. I have since revised the first possibility.”

Despite the pain, I almost laughed.

Dominic did not.

“Your daughter saved my mother’s life,” he said. “Costa’s people learned she survived. The announcement made attacking her equivalent to attacking me.”

“Victor Costa,” I said.

His face changed by half a degree.

I had never heard the name before that moment, but now I watched him realize someone had told me more than he expected.

“Who said that name?” he asked.

“Your nurse has a television.”

That was a lie. I had heard Enzo say it when he thought I was unconscious in recovery.

Dominic knew I was lying.

He let it pass.

“The ring bought time,” he said.

“You could have hired security.”

“I did.”

“You could have moved me.”

“I tried.”

“You could have waited until I woke up and asked me.”

His jaw tightened.

That one landed.

“Take it off,” I said again.

He stepped forward.

My body reacted before my mind did. I pulled my hand toward my chest and gasped as the movement tugged at bandages beneath my gown.

Dominic stopped instantly.

Then, without argument, he backed away.

“Isabella can remove it,” he said.

His mother came to my bedside. Her hands were cool and steady. The swelling in my fingers had gone down enough that the band slid free with a little soap from the sink.

She placed it on the bedside table.

The room felt easier to breathe in.

Not safe.

Just mine again.

Dominic watched the ring for a moment.

“I won’t put it back on you,” he said.

“Generous.”

“Lena.”

“Don’t use my name like we know each other.”

That was when I saw Enzo standing just outside the open door.

He held a black file against his side.

The same file, I would later realize, that had existed before the shooting.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Dominic followed my gaze.

“Enzo Marino.”

“The man with my file?”

Enzo’s expression went still.

Dominic said nothing.

My mother looked between them. “What file?”

I pushed myself a fraction higher against the pillows. Pain blurred the edges of the room, but anger kept me conscious.

“That,” I said, pointing toward Enzo.

Dominic turned. “Leave it outside.”

“No.”

His eyes came back to me.

“If that file has my name on it, it stays in this room.”

“Not yet.”

“Then you can leave.”

“We need to discuss your security.”

“I need to discuss why a stranger had a background file on me before I was shot.”

My mother went pale.

Dominic’s silence answered too much.

Ellen stood. She was still wearing the loose cardigan she traveled in, and there was a hospital bracelet on her wrist from the cardiac unit downstairs. She looked physically smaller than Dominic, but in that moment he seemed to understand that she was the dangerous person in the room.

“Did you know my daughter?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then why were you investigating her?”

Dominic glanced at the door, as if deciding how much of the truth could safely exist in a hospital room.

I hated that calculation.

“You don’t get to decide what I can handle,” I said.

His gaze returned to mine.

“You almost died last night.”

“And while I was unconscious, you turned me into a message for your enemies. Stop pretending this is about protecting my feelings.”

For the first time, he looked angry.

Not at me.

At himself, maybe.

Or at the fact that I had found the exact place to cut.

Enzo stepped inside and closed the door.

“Boss,” he said, “Costa’s men have been asking about Daniel Hart.”

My mother’s hand slipped from the bed rail.

The sound was small.

But all three men in the room heard it.

I turned toward her.

“Dad?”

Ellen stared at Enzo.

Her face had emptied.

My father had been dead for eighteen years.

At least that was the story I knew.

Daniel Hart had worked as an accountant for a shipping company in Red Hook. One night there had been a warehouse fire. He died before firefighters could reach the second floor.

I remembered almost nothing about him except his hands. Long fingers stained with blue ink. A habit of tapping twice on the kitchen table before standing up. The smell of peppermint gum.

My mother never talked about the company after his funeral.

Now she looked as if someone had opened a door she had spent eighteen years holding shut.

“Mom?”

She sat slowly.

Dominic’s attention shifted to her.

“You knew,” he said.

She looked at him with open hatred.

“I knew enough to stay away from your family.”

My heart monitor sped up.

A nurse appeared at the door almost immediately. Isabella intercepted her, spoke quietly, and persuaded her to give us another minute.

I looked at Dominic.

“What did my father have to do with you?”

“Not me,” he said.

“Your family, then.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He exhaled through his nose.

“Daniel Hart kept books for a company my father controlled.”

My mother closed her eyes.

There it was.

Not a warehouse accountant.

Not exactly.

A Rossi accountant.

I felt the bed tilt beneath me even though nothing moved.

“What happened to him?”

Dominic did not answer immediately.

My mother did.

“He found something.”

I looked at her.

“What?”

“I don’t know all of it.”

“You never told me any of this.”

“I was trying to keep you alive.”

The words hit harder than Dominic’s ring.

Alive.

Not sheltered. Not protected from bad memories.

Alive.

Enzo put the black file on the counter.

Dominic shot him a look.

“She already knows enough to be in danger,” Enzo said. “Half-truths won’t make that better.”

I almost liked him for that.

Dominic walked to the file but did not open it.

“Your father discovered money moving through companies connected to Victor Costa,” he said. “My father was supposed to investigate. Before he did, Daniel died in the warehouse fire.”

“And you think Costa killed him.”

“I think someone did.”

“Why investigate me eighteen years later?”

His eyes held mine.

“Because three months ago, an old Rossi account moved for the first time since your father died.”

“What account?”

“One tied to a trust Daniel created.”

My mother stood again.

“No.”

Dominic looked at her.

“You know about it.”

“I know what Daniel told me to do if anyone ever came asking.”

My skin went cold.

“What did he tell you?”

Ellen shook her head.

“Not here.”

Dominic’s mouth tightened. “Mrs. Hart—”

“Not. Here.”

There was no weakness in her voice now.

A sharp knock interrupted us.

One of Dominic’s security men opened the door only far enough to speak.

“Mr. Rossi. We have a problem downstairs.”

Dominic’s posture changed immediately.

“What?”

“A man tried to enter the cardiac wing using a maintenance badge. He had Mrs. Hart’s room number written inside his sleeve.”

My mother sat down hard.

I stared at Dominic.

The argument over the ring suddenly felt very far away.

He looked at me, and this time there was no attempt to soften anything.

“Victor knows your mother is here.”

I looked at the black file.

“Then I want the truth before he gets another chance.”

Dominic hesitated.

I reached toward the folder.

My hand shook from pain, but I did not stop.

“Open it.”

He did.

The first page showed a grainy photograph of my father standing beside a younger Salvatore Rossi outside a warehouse.

Below it, typed in heavy black letters, was a line I read twice before it made sense.

DANIEL HART — INTERNAL FINANCIAL AUDIT / UNRESOLVED DEATH.

For eighteen years, I had thought my father died because a bad electrical panel met an old warehouse full of dry wood and bad luck. I had hated that story because it was so ordinary. A family could be destroyed by a faulty wire, and there was nobody to blame.

The page in front of me was worse.

It meant someone might have chosen the fire. It meant my mother had built our entire life around a danger she could not explain. It meant Dominic Rossi had known my father’s name before he ever caught that champagne glass.

I looked at him.

“You said we didn’t know each other.”

“We didn’t.”

“You knew enough to investigate me.”