I heard his footsteps approaching across the hardwood, each one measured and deliberate, and I slowly closed my eyes.
"Does it hurt?"
His tone, for once, carried a trace of gentleness, thin as a razor's edge and just as dangerous.
"Hang in there. It'll be over soon."
I turned my head away, unwilling to waste a single word on him, staring instead at the wall where a framed photograph of Salvatore Valente's younger days hung in judgment over the room.
By the time they had drawn eight hundred cc's of blood, my lips were already turning purple, and the edges of my vision had gone soft, the study dissolving into watercolor at the periphery.
Just then, a faint cough echoed from the master bedroom down the corridor. Daniela.
Upon hearing it, Dominic immediately pushed the doctor's hand aside and ordered him to draw twice as much, his voice carrying the flat certainty of a man issuing a kill order.
The doctor, drenched in cold sweat, his hands shaking around the syringe, warned him again. "If I continue, your wife could die."