Before I could leave the pharmacy, the infection from my wound dropped me where I stood, collapsing right there on the floor.
When I opened my eyes again, I was lying in a hospital ward. A nurse was quietly changing my dressing, never noticing I'd woken. She spoke freely with another, their voices drifting through the room without restraint.
"You hear about the boy two floors down? They say he's the only grandson of the Moretti famiglia. Critical condition, and Don Moretti is out of his mind over it. Flew in specialists from across the ocean overnight just to stand at the bed."
"How does a child that small end up cut up so bad? You think it's a vendetta? Somebody settling a score against the Family?"
"Who knows. The Don's wife went into the ground years back, and that boy is all he's got. Whoever put a hand on him is already a dead man walking. The kid's still hanging by a thread."
"Those men outside the door don't move like rent-a-cops..."
"Shh. Keep your mouth shut. We don't want trouble with people like that. Those aren't guards, those are made men."
When they finished and left, their words sat in my chest like cold iron.
The Morettis were deeper and more dangerous than I had let myself imagine.
Gemma's fate was sealed.
I wasted no time arranging to sign myself out. But the moment I stepped into the hallway, I ran straight into the Don's right hand, Miles Greco. His face was drawn tight as he stopped strangers along the corridor, asking after their blood types.
"The boy's wound is badly infected, and he's losing blood fast," he said. "The bank here doesn't have enough on hand."
For a moment, I hesitated. Then I pressed my thumb hard against the inside of my left wrist, gritted my teeth, and stepped forward.
"I can help," I said.
It was the only way I knew to repay a blood debt Gemma had run up in my name.
The matter was urgent, so they pushed my paperwork through without ceremony. No formalities, no record of the transfusion at all. They had me in the procedure room within minutes.
Afterward I heard the boy had stabilized. Relieved, I quietly slid the needle from my arm and slipped out without leaving a single name behind me.
Once I was clear of the hospital, I rented a cheap, narrow room on the edge of the city. My laborer's wages stretched only far enough for a run-down unit, and it sat, of all places, near the very docks where the accident had happened.
From my window I could see the site had gone dark. Warning fences ringed the lot, and the dock men were being questioned one by one. At the center of it all stood Lorenzo Moretti himself.
Terrified of being seen, I stayed shut inside that room and refused to set foot beyond the door.
Gemma was the exact opposite.
Every day she circled the hospital, hoping to put herself in the Don's path and convince him she was the selfless soul who had saved his son.
For three days, not a single man so much as looked at her. Desperate, she forced the matter and walked into the ward under the pretense of asking after the boy.
That drew the attention of the Don's people at once. Greco recognized her face, and when the boy spoke of an "older sister" who had been kind to him in the worst of it, they took her for that sister.
Grateful, Greco gave his word that Don Moretti would call on Gemma in person once the boy was out of danger.
Gemma had been waiting for exactly that. She'd had someone film the whole exchange in secret and put the footage out for the neighborhood to see.
By the next day, the story of "Gemma's brave act to save the only Moretti heir" had run through the tenements like fire down a fuse.
Overnight, she went from a nobody to a whispered legend.
People hungry for any thread to the Moretti name crowded into our place, heaping praise and thanks on her. They said she hadn't only saved a boy. She'd saved an entire famiglia.
They called Gemma the kindest soul the city had ever bred, and tributes of every kind began arriving at our door in her honor.
In the middle of the frenzy, Gemma made her own statement, dripping with righteousness.
"I didn't do it expecting anything back," she said. When the question pressed her, she laughed a half-beat too quick and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Even if it had been some ordinary family's child, I'd have done the same. Who could stand by at a moment like that?"
Her words set the picture in stone, the warm-hearted heroine, and the whole neighborhood ate it whole.
Meanwhile, I was sick with fear.
Dreading the storm Gemma's lies were about to call down, I had my name struck from the family name that very night, renounced before witnesses, gone.
When I went back to collect my things, I found Frank and Carol basking in their borrowed glory. Their pride was so thick they all but floated with every step across the floor.
