Chapter 1 - THE MAN WHO WASN’T SLEEPING
Faking a coma was the only way Zeo Rossi could uncover the truth about the people closest to him.
The bullets that placed him in the hospital were real. The rhythmic beeping of the monitors was real. The blood dried across his skin was real.
The unconsciousness was not.
Behind closed eyelids, Zeo waited to discover who would mourn him, who would steal from him, and who would attempt to finish what the gunmen had started.
It took less than 24 hours for his fiancée to bring her lover into the room.
The more consequential presence, however, belonged to the woman cleaning the floor.
The most difficult part of pretending to be comatose was not remaining still. It was ignoring the itch at the base of the skull where the hospital pillow met the rough edge of the gown.
It began as a minor irritation and grew into a demand for movement.
Zeo resisted it.
He had spent his life building an empire through blood and extortion in the city’s underworld. He would not allow an itch to destroy the performance.
He lay inside a private suite at St. Jude’s Medical Center. Bleach, wilted lilies, and the metallic trace of his own dried blood filled the room.
The blinds had been left partially open, allowing amber streetlight to enter the darkness.
3 days earlier, Zeo left a steakhouse and received 2 hollow-point rounds in the chest.
He knew the attack was coming.
He wore Kevlar. He paid the paramedics in advance. He purchased the silence of Dr. Aris, the chief of surgery, who officially reported that Zeo had entered a coma after severe blood loss caused hypoxic brain damage.
The deception was elaborate and expensive.
Zeo considered both qualities necessary.
Someone inside his inner circle had been leaking information.
Shipments had been seized. Safe houses had been raided. Someone close enough to understand his movements was speaking to federal investigators or rival organizations.
Zeo needed the source.
He became a conscious ghost inside his own body and listened.
His hospital room received a steady procession of hypocrites.
Captains arrived smelling of expensive cigars and inexpensive guilt. They muttered prayers to a God they did not fear and placed heavy hands on Zeo’s motionless shoulder.
He memorized every voice.
He noted which men sounded genuinely frightened by the vacuum his death might create and which already sounded as though they were measuring his office for new furniture.
Then Camilla arrived.
The sharp clicks of her Louboutin heels announced her before she entered.
Her perfume cost more than many vehicles and carried heavy notes of jasmine and bergamot. It had once intoxicated Zeo.
With his eyes closed, it smelled like poison.
During visiting hours, Camilla whispered his name with enough emotion for the nurses to hear.
She held his hand with fingers that were always cold. She pressed her face into his neck, allowing mascara to drag dryly against his skin.
There were never tears.
When the nurses left, the performance ended.
Camilla released his hand as though touching something rotten. Zeo heard her silk coat move and the strike of a match.
She smoked beneath the oxygen warning sign and paced.
She did not speak to him when they were alone.
She waited.
Another woman entered the room during the night shifts.
She did not smell of wealth or violence.
She smelled of industrial soap and stale laundry detergent.
Her rubber-soled shoes were nearly silent.
According to a brief exchange with the charge nurse, her name was Nora.
She emptied the waste bins, cleaned the floor around Zeo’s bed, and changed the water inside the vases containing flowers his enemies had sent as insults.
Nora did not stare at him or speak unnecessarily.
She worked with methodical, exhausted precision.
Camilla brought tension into the room.
Nora brought rhythm.
The movement of the mop and the cloth across the glass table became the sound of the working world Zeo had escaped 30 years earlier.
On the 4th night, the atmosphere changed.
Zeo was awake and controlling his breathing through meditative techniques he had paid a monk in Thailand to teach him 10 years earlier.
The door opened without a knock.
It closed with a heavy sound.
The lock engaged.
Zeo heard Camilla’s heels and the heavier steps of a man.
His pulse increased before he could stop it.
The monitor’s rhythm accelerated slightly.
He forced his jaw to relax and released a controlled breath.
“Keep your voice down,” Camilla said.
“He is a vegetable, Cam. Relax.”
The man’s voice struck Zeo harder than the bullets had.
Thomas.
His underboss.
Thomas had been the best man at Zeo’s 1st wedding. He had dragged Zeo from a burning vehicle during the 1990s.
“I do not care,” Camilla said. “The nurses make rounds. If someone sees you here with me at 2:00 a.m., it creates questions.”
“Let them ask.”
A chair scraped across the floor as Thomas sat.
“The doctor says he is not waking. His brain was without oxygen too long. We need to decide the timing.”
Zeo remained completely still while the 2 people he trusted most discussed his death and inheritance.
The monitor continued at 65 beats per minute.
Inside, rage consumed him.
He wanted to rise and close his hands around Thomas’s neck. He wanted to see Camilla understand what she had done.
He could not reveal himself yet.
Exposing them would not expose the entire network they had built.
Zeo needed to understand the full extent of the betrayal.
“Did you find the ledger?” Camilla asked.
“No,” Thomas replied. “The estate safe was empty. He moved it.”
“You said it was there. You said you watched him place the flash drive in the wall safe.”
“I did. He must have become suspicious.”
“If we do not have the offshore routing numbers, all of this was useless.”
Her voice hardened.
“The shooting was poorly handled. He is still breathing, and now we have to wait for the body to follow the brain. Meanwhile, the Greek syndicate wants the port contracts.”
She continued.
“We cannot authorize the transfer without Zeo’s digital signature.”
Zeo committed every detail to memory.
The Greeks.
The shipping routes.
Camilla and Thomas intended to sell his port operations to a rival organization.
They were the leak.
“We terminate life support tomorrow,” Thomas said with casual certainty. “You are his medical proxy.”
His plan was clear.
“You make the tearful decision and tell the physicians you cannot continue watching him suffer. Once he is legally dead, the safeguards in his will activate. You receive temporary control as his fiancée, and we compel the attorneys to open the blind trusts.”
Cold perspiration formed across Zeo’s chest.
He had instructed Dr. Aris to reject all requests to terminate treatment.
Thomas solved obstacles with money or threats.
The physician might not hold.
“Tomorrow,” Camilla agreed. “I will contact the attorneys in the morning. Place your men inside the hospital. I do not want Zeo’s loyalists causing a scene in intensive care.”
“They are handled.”
Silence followed.
Zeo heard the wet sound of a kiss.
“You are beautiful when you are ruthless,” Thomas said.
“Get the money, Tommy. Then you can tell me I am beautiful.”
Their footsteps receded.
The lock opened.
The door closed behind them.
Zeo remained alone with the weight of his rage.
He had not loved Camilla in years.
She had become an acquisition, a beautiful and polished companion suited to charity events and gala dinners.
Her betrayal was less a heartbreak than an insult.
He had allowed a viper into his home.
The performance had continued long enough.
Zeo needed to contact Dr. Aris and signal his outside man to extract him before morning.
He began moving his index finger toward the emergency button attached beneath the bed rail.
A sudden breath came from the corner near the private bathroom.
Zeo stopped.
Someone else was inside the room.
Someone had remained perfectly silent throughout the conversation.
The wheel of a mop bucket squeaked.
Nora.
She had been cleaning the bathroom when Camilla and Thomas entered. She had remained trapped inside and heard the entire conspiracy.
Zeo’s finger remained close to the button.
He considered what she might do.
Knowledge had value.
She could contact the police or the press.
She might approach Thomas and demand money for silence.
Soft footsteps moved toward the bed.
Zeo closed his eyes firmly.
The air changed as Nora leaned over him.
Bleach and perspiration surrounded her.
“I know you can hear me.”
Her voice was rough with exhaustion.
Zeo did not react.
“I saw your eyes moving beneath the lids. Your breathing changed while they spoke.”
She moved closer.
“The machine did not register it, but I did. I watch you breathe every night.”
Cold panic entered Zeo’s chest.
He had not accounted for an observant cleaning woman.
“I do not care what you have done,” Nora continued. “I know you are some kind of mafia boss. Everyone in the staff room talks about it.”
Her voice trembled, but there was strength beneath it.
“I will not allow them to kill you inside this bed.”
Zeo’s thoughts moved rapidly.
She might have been testing him.
She might have been wearing a recording device.
“I am leaving now,” Nora said. “I will behave as though I heard nothing.”
The pillow lifted slightly.
A cheap telephone slid against Zeo’s neck.
“I am putting my burner beneath the pillow. It has a clean SIM card. Call your people before morning.”
The pillow settled.
“Good luck, Mr. Rossi.”
Nora’s rubber shoes moved toward the exit.
The handle turned.
The door did not open.
There was a heavy impact, a suppressed grunt, and the door being forced backward.
Zeo opened his eyes.
Instinct overruled discipline.
Amber light filled the room.
Nora was pinned against the wall by a man wearing a blue hospital scrub top.
1 hand covered her mouth.
The other held a syringe containing a cloudy yellow liquid.
Potassium chloride, Zeo assumed.
It would cause cardiac arrest and leave little useful evidence in a man already expected to die.
Thomas had decided not to wait until morning.
The assassin was large, with a thick neck and empty eyes.
He pressed Nora into the wall while looking toward the bed.
He saw Zeo awake and froze.
A corpse had opened its eyes.
Nora used the hesitation.
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She bit deeply into the man’s hand.
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