Chapter 7 - THE SAFE HOUSE ON THE COVE
The salt air tasted like clean snow.
We drove north in Dominic’s black Mercedes, leaving the city skyline behind in a gray blur of freezing sleet.
The heater blasted hot air through the vents, but my teeth refused to stop chattering.
Matteo drove with one hand on the steering wheel.
His left hand remained pressed against his ribs, holding a sterile gauze pad tight around the silver pen.
He had refused to let me pull it out.
“Not until we reach the clinic,” he had told me.
“If you pull the plug now, the lung collapses again before we reach Nahant.”
He was right.
Medically, the silver cylinder was the only thing keeping him alive.
We turned off the coastal highway onto a private gravel lane lined with ancient, wind-bent cedars.
At the end of the point, perched over the crashing waves of the North Shore, stood an old stone carriage house.
No security gates.
No guards in tactical vests.
Only dark granite, weathered cedar shingles, and the pale light of an overcast dawn breaking over the Atlantic.
“Where are we?” I asked, leaning my forehead against the cold passenger glass.
“My grandfather’s boathouse,” Matteo said.
He killed the engine.
The silence that followed was immense.
Only the rhythmic crash of the surf against the rocky headland below.
He reached across the console and took my right hand.
His fingers were warm, steady, surprisingly gentle for a man who had broken two collarbones this morning.
“We are safe here for four hours,” he said.
“Dominic didn't know this property existed.”
“And Sal Moretti?”
“Moretti thinks I’m dead in the elevator shaft.”
Matteo opened his door and stepped out into the freezing wind.
I followed him up the stone steps to the heavy oak door.
He unlocked it with a simple brass skeleton key.
The interior smelled of dry pine wood, beeswax, and sea salt.
A cast-iron woodstove sat in the center of the open living room, flanked by two deep leather armchairs.
In the corner stood a fully stocked emergency medical cabinet—surgical instruments, suture kits, bags of saline, and morphine ampules.
“My grandfather was paranoid,” Matteo remarked, tossing his coat onto a chair.
“He expected a war every winter.”
“He was a smart man,” I said, walking straight to the cabinet.
I washed my hands in the sink with scalding water and iodine soap.
I pulled out a sterile scalpel, a chest tube kit, a suture tray, and two bottles of local lidocaine.
I turned around.
Matteo had already stripped off his vest and torn shirt.
He sat on the wooden bench beneath the window, his bare torso illuminated by the gray morning light.
His chest was a tapestry of violence.
Knife scars across his ribs.
A bullet graze across his left shoulder.
And right below his clavicle, the silver Montblanc pen stood upright like an antique dagger.
I knelt between his knees.
“This will hurt more than the tunnel,” I warned him.
His amber eyes held mine.
“I’ve had worse, Clara.”
“You’ve never had a surgeon pull a silver pen from your pleural cavity without general anesthesia.”
“Then do your worst, doctor.”
I prepped the skin with betadine.
I injected three milliliters of lidocaine around the puncture site.
I gripped the barrel of the pen with my left hand.
My right wrist throbbed with a dull, heavy pulse, but I used my forearm to brace against his knee.
“Take a deep breath,” I instructed.
“Hold it on three.”
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
I pulled the silver pen straight out.
A sharp hiss of air escaped his chest.
Matteo didn't roar this time.
He clenched his jaw until a muscle jumped beneath his ear, his fingers digging into the edge of the wooden bench until the pine groaned.
I immediately inserted the sterile silicon chest tube through the tract, securing it with two silk sutures and an airtight flutter valve.
The bleeding was minimal.
The lung remained expanded.
I cleaned the wound with peroxide and taped a heavy gauze dressing over his ribs.
I dropped the bloody instruments into the stainless steel basin with a loud clatter.
My knees gave way.
I sat back on the floorboards, leaning against the base of the woodstove, my chest heaving with exhaustion.
Matteo looked down at his chest.
He touched the clean white dressing with the tips of his fingers.
Then he reached down.
He took my good hand and pulled me up from the floor.
He didn't let go when I stood between his knees.
He reached behind me, pulling a heavy wool blanket from the back of the sofa, and wrapped it around my bare shoulders.
His hands lingered on my collarbone.
“Why did you leave Boston two years ago, Clara?” he asked softly.
The question hung in the warm air of the boathouse.
I looked at the waves crashing against the rocks outside.
“Sal Moretti brought his son to my ER,” I whispered.
“A gunshot wound to the chest.”
“He told me if his boy died, he would burn my family’s house in Southie.”
“His boy died on my table.”
A tear tracked through the dried blood on my cheek.
“The next morning, three men dragged me into an alley behind the hospital.”
“They broke my right wrist with a tire iron.”
“They told me I would never hold a scalpel again.”
“Dominic was one of those men, wasn't he?” Matteo asked.
His voice had dropped into a register so dark it chilled the room.
“I didn't see his face,” I said.
“It was dark. Raining.”
“I only remembered the voice.”
“*‘Make sure she can’t hold a knife,’* he said.”
Matteo’s hands tightened on my shoulders.
He pulled me against his chest, tucking my face into the crook of his neck.
His skin was warm, smelling of cedar and sea salt.
His heart beat strong and steady against my cheek.
“Dominic took your career,” Matteo whispered into my hair.
“He took your name.”
“He forced you to scrub grease in a diner for two years.”
He tilted my chin upward until my eyes met his glowing amber gaze.
May you like
“Tonight, Clara Vance,” he swore,
“I am going to give you back your city.”
