Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 108: Maddox .“Gia!”Gianna was jarred away from her conversation with Rio as Giovanni nearly barreled into her side, exclaiming, “This party is awesome!”“You just like it because of the food,” Gianna accused, but she gave Giovanni a playful nudge to the shoulder. “Go ahead and eat as much as you want. I hear that the person who’s supposed to be looking after your eating habits hasn’t been doing a good job.”Giovanni made a surprised squeak, damaged eyebrows going high. Rio scoffed.With the speeches over the floor was quickly becoming a small dancing area, music playing softly. It was a sure sign that the night was starting to conclude.Giovanni dashed back to the food table and Gianna turned to Rio, asking, “Do you want to dance?” She would have loved if Dante had been able to come. Truthfully, Gianna was a bit desperate to finally be able to show off the person who held her heart. But Dante had been extra busy with Axel lately, and she was tryi
Helping Mr. Gang Leader.Chapter 109: crying for the rest of my life .Maddox was in the apartment.Maddox was in a personal, private space that was supposed to be safe. And if he’d gotten past the men standing guard outside …Wiggling her toes a little against the water, Gianna asked quietly, “What are you doing here?.”She didn’t want to wake Dante. She couldn’t. If Dante came out here to where Maddox was with a gun, it would only put him in danger. Gianna couldn’t risk that. She wouldn’t.“It’s all gone,” Maddox eased out, moving forward fully into the light, gun raised to Gianna’s chest level. “It’s gone and it’s your fault.”“My fault?” Gianna questioned. She shook her head a little. “No. I …”“Clyde,” Maddox said morosely, more like a sad wail than anything else. “Clyde. He’s gone.”Gianna took that as confirmation that Clyde was likely dead.“I didn’t kill him,” Gianna said evenly.Maddox looked … worrisome. From where Gianna was standing she could see that Maddox’s eyes wer
Helping Mr. Gang Leader .Epilogue: Time to start living .If six months ago, when Gianna had been worried that her father would pull funding for the clinic, and that they’d have to close their doors to an ailing public who needed them, anyone had told Gianna that not only would her clinic be surviving, but also thriving and expanding, she would have laughed and then likely wept.But with the summer heat beating down outside, Angelo sending post cards regularly, Harry a fulltime practitioner at the clinic, and full community support, the clinic was now officially relocated to a building that was three times its original size.It was a surreal moment for Gianna, walking through the front doors of the new clinic that was set to open in less than two days, looking around at what her hard work and dedication had finally landed her.Infinite being flushed out of the area, regardless of how it had happened and the part Gianna felt she played in it, was the best thing that could have happe
Helping Mr. Gang Leader.Chapter 1:.On the day Gianna’s life changed drastically and irreparably, she endured a particularly painful luncheon with her father.Gianna, for the most part, considered herself to be a respectful and obedient daughter.She was, to the best of her ability, the perfect daughter.But her father was a particularly hard man to please, and nothing Gianna had ever done felt like enough.Gianna had an ulcer by sixteen, hair falling out by seventeen, and by eighteen she went away to college to save herself more than anything else.“—could have been something special. Wasted opportunity, that’s what you are.”Gianna tapped a finger gently against the condensation on her water glass.“--paying attention, Gianna?”She straightened up. “Yes, of course.”“Oh?” Her father asked, a gray eyebrow raised.“I believe you were lamenting on my poor career choices,” Gianna told him, a little too flippantly if the way her father’s eyes narrowed, meant anything.“Watch yourself,
Helping Mr. Gang Leader .Chapter 2: a brother's love. “Do you need an ambulance?” Giovanni demanded, and it certainly sounded like her brother.“Hurt?” Gianna managed to get out, but thankfully she was starting to feel a little better. Her chest wasn’t so tight and she didn’t feel as if she were seconds away from a heart attack. “You …hurt?” She could only see the blood on her baby brother’s face.“No,” Giovanni was quick to tell her, tugging her into a much more confident hug. “Gia, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would happen. I didn’t think about your heart at all.”“Is she a doctor or not?” the man with a gun demanded.As Gianna steadied further, she saw Giovanni give a confident nod and say, “My sister is the best doctor I know. Get Cypher to one of the examination rooms and I’ll have Gia there in thirty seconds.”“He better be good,” The man with the gun said, but then he was darting away to follow orders.Gianna grabbed hard to Giovanni’s sleeve and demanded, “
Helping Mr. Gang Leader .Chapter 3: .Rio shouted, “I’m talking to you!”“Don’t snap at my sister like that!” Giovanni’s own voice rose.And then the new comer, whoever he was, interjected, “Stop fighting, all of you!”Gianna turned to Rio and looked him straight in the eyes. “Do you know why you have thirty seconds to get out of my operating room?”“Go ahead and tell me.”“Because,” Gianna said, muttering a thank you to Zeke when he deposited the tools at her side. “Because you’re the idiot who pointed a gun at me. You’re the idiot who, instead of asking nicely if I could save his friend’s life, demanded that I do so. Because I don’t like you. Because I don’t like violence. And because this is a clinic where I treat people and take care of them, and you are making it very difficult for me to want to do that. Now, your friend is laid out on my operating table, bleeding out from a gunshot wound. Do you want to stay here and be an ass, or do you want to leave now and let me work? Fif
Helping Mr. Gang Leader .Chapter 4: .Giovanni rushed out, “Gia! The police are here!”Gianna whipped off her bloodied gloves at once, giving a worried look down to Dante’s still body. “Figures they’d pick tonight to be the one time they make it here within an hour of an emergency.”Uncertainly, Giovanni asked, “What are we going to do?”There was a lot implied in that simple sentence. Gianna knew at one that whatever her brother was mixed up in, whoever Dante or Cypher was, it wasn’t good. And the police were a complication that could possibly endanger everyone.Gianna was certainly going to rip her brother a new one at the first chance she got, but she wasn’t going to let anyone else hurt him. She wasn’t going to let Giovanni be in danger, and she wasn’t going to expose him to the police.And then there was Rio to consider, with his gun. The clinic couldn’t afford a shootout, and Gianna couldn’t let anything happen on her watch that endangered people, including her patient on th
Helping Mr. Gang Leader.Chapter 5: . “Talk,” Gianna demanded, and she wasn’t going to let Giovanni go until she had all the answers.“You’re not going to like it,” Giovanni warned.Gianna told him plainly, “Somehow, I already figured that.”“Don’t you think instead we should talk about how you almost had a heart attack tonight?”Gianna narrowed her eyes at her brother. “You’re attempting to distract me.”But then she wasn’t so sure, because Giovanni looked absolutely serious and worried as he insisted, “Oh, we can talk about all the things you want to know in a second. I’m fully prepared for that lecture, I have readied myself. But Gia, you almost … it looked like …”“Your friend,” Gianna said tersely, “the one with the gun, he startled me.”“We almost lost someone we’d do anything for.”Gianna sighed. There was never an excuse for bringing a weapon into a house of healing. But instead of fighting the matter, she told her brother, “I can tell all of you care very much for each ot
Helping Mr. Gang Leader .Epilogue: Time to start living .If six months ago, when Gianna had been worried that her father would pull funding for the clinic, and that they’d have to close their doors to an ailing public who needed them, anyone had told Gianna that not only would her clinic be surviving, but also thriving and expanding, she would have laughed and then likely wept.But with the summer heat beating down outside, Angelo sending post cards regularly, Harry a fulltime practitioner at the clinic, and full community support, the clinic was now officially relocated to a building that was three times its original size.It was a surreal moment for Gianna, walking through the front doors of the new clinic that was set to open in less than two days, looking around at what her hard work and dedication had finally landed her.Infinite being flushed out of the area, regardless of how it had happened and the part Gianna felt she played in it, was the best thing that could have happe
Helping Mr. Gang Leader.Chapter 109: crying for the rest of my life .Maddox was in the apartment.Maddox was in a personal, private space that was supposed to be safe. And if he’d gotten past the men standing guard outside …Wiggling her toes a little against the water, Gianna asked quietly, “What are you doing here?.”She didn’t want to wake Dante. She couldn’t. If Dante came out here to where Maddox was with a gun, it would only put him in danger. Gianna couldn’t risk that. She wouldn’t.“It’s all gone,” Maddox eased out, moving forward fully into the light, gun raised to Gianna’s chest level. “It’s gone and it’s your fault.”“My fault?” Gianna questioned. She shook her head a little. “No. I …”“Clyde,” Maddox said morosely, more like a sad wail than anything else. “Clyde. He’s gone.”Gianna took that as confirmation that Clyde was likely dead.“I didn’t kill him,” Gianna said evenly.Maddox looked … worrisome. From where Gianna was standing she could see that Maddox’s eyes wer
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 108: Maddox .“Gia!”Gianna was jarred away from her conversation with Rio as Giovanni nearly barreled into her side, exclaiming, “This party is awesome!”“You just like it because of the food,” Gianna accused, but she gave Giovanni a playful nudge to the shoulder. “Go ahead and eat as much as you want. I hear that the person who’s supposed to be looking after your eating habits hasn’t been doing a good job.”Giovanni made a surprised squeak, damaged eyebrows going high. Rio scoffed.With the speeches over the floor was quickly becoming a small dancing area, music playing softly. It was a sure sign that the night was starting to conclude.Giovanni dashed back to the food table and Gianna turned to Rio, asking, “Do you want to dance?” She would have loved if Dante had been able to come. Truthfully, Gianna was a bit desperate to finally be able to show off the person who held her heart. But Dante had been extra busy with Axel lately, and she was tryi
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 107: Unrequited love: The most painful kind of love to be trapped in .There was something to be said for persevering through adversity.Because for the first time in a very long time, Gianna managed to have an amazing Christmas.Christmas time for Gianna was typically not a huge event. She knew a fairly large number of people who celebrated the holiday, both religiously and in the secular sense, but with Gianna’s reduced family size, there weren’t a lot of people to celebrate with. She might go to a party or two, and see Giovanni for a few hours, but that was it. Most years she bought Christmas presents for the people she knew—almost in a compulsive way, and received a few only from the people she tended to be closest with.When she’d been a child, it had been the house keepers and nannies buying both herself and Giovanni presents with a prescribed budget from their father. Gianna couldn’t remember the last time her father had handed her a pres
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 106: Mariposa takes care of family .For the first time in a while, Gianna saw some kind of amusement in her father’s eyes. The kind of emotion that Gianna thought had been carefully cut out over the years.“I’ve lied a lot over the past week and a half,” Her father said, looking Gianna in the eyes. “I lied about where my information about Infinite came from. I lied about Mariposa’s association with what happened. I lied about Mariposa’s identities. I lied about you being there at all, other than coincidentally, and I falsified information to make certain people disappear from the records. Not only that, I’ve … provided certain incentives to other individuals to make sure no important names ever come up or can be tied to this.”“Oh, dad,” Gianna sighed out, tears in her eyes.“Considering I deployed the national guard,” his father continued, “to offer back up to one gang over another in a conflict that spilled out onto the streets and ended up inju
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 105: a medical mystery .Gianna screamed. She screamed her throat raw until it was painful to even breathe, and then she kept screaming, eyes locked on Rio’s body.“Shut the fuck up!” Clyde demanded, stalking towards her, the gun still raised.No. Not Rio. There was no way Rio was dead. He couldn’t be.“I said shut the fuck up!”Gianna couldn’t. She couldn’t stop screaming. She wasn’t in control of her body anymore.Clyde fired off a second shot, inches from Gianna. The bullet imbedded into the ground and Gianna fell quiet maybe out of an inability to do anything else, more than the fear.“Christ! Finally.” Clyde let out a long breath.Gianna gasped out a sob, and then she was crying openly, reaching out trembling fingers for Rio.Blood was seeping out around Rio’s body at a slow crawl, but from the way he’d fallen Gianna couldn’t tell where the bullet had gone in. She couldn’t even properly address the injury. She couldn’t do anything but collapse
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 104: infinite bastards .The moment she injected the morphine into herself, feeling the buzz of the drug kick in, chasing away the pain, she sighed in relief. It made her a little loopy, relaxing back against the bed in a useless kind of way, but she was so thankful to be free of the pain she’d felt constantly for a day, that it was worth it.And it was hard, so terribly hard, with how exhausted she was, and lonely and scared, but after that Gianna forced herself to sit up and keep going.In the other syringe she loaded a likely lethal dose of sedative. It was hard to tell though, even for a doctor, as Infinite employed various sized people. The dose she’d filled would kill someone like Donald, put someone like Clyde into a coma, and likely only knock out someone Hagrid’s size.She wasn’t looking to kill anyone, but if they sent Hagrid after her, Gianna couldn’t take the chance that a smaller dose would barely have any effect. Hagrid was strong, in
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 103: Karma? .When they locked her back in her room that night after the phone call, instead of taking her downstairs, it was absolutely clear to Gianna that they planned to use her as bait. They were going to dangle her out in front of Mariposa in the coming days and reduce her to mere fodder.Gianna, who cared more about Giovanni and Dante, and the rest of Mariposa, than anyone else in the world, was not willing to let that stand.She wasn’t just going to roll over and let things happen. Infinite had the advantage now, but Gianna was creative. She was creative, and above all else, she was desperate.So that night, using a pair of grooming sheers she found in the bathroom, she tore up the sheets on her bed. They were thick and of an extremely high quality, the kind of thread count that Gianna had grown up sleeping on. The best money could buy. But most importantly, it meant the material didn’t have much give. And she could wrap her ribs tightly an
Helping Mr. Gang Leader . Chapter 102: Gia is Mariposa now . “For Gia, right?” Giovanni asked, staring hard at Dante. “We’re going in for Gia, right?”And not for Maddox. The second half of the question was left off, but implied all the same.Rio said hotly, “If I come across that bastard, I’m going to take a shot.”“You’re not alone,” Ezekiel interjected.“Of course,” Dante said, voice going rough. “If any of us has the chance to end this by cutting the head off the snake, take the shot. But this is about getting Gia out. Leave Axel and his men to gun for Maddox. If we get Gia out, then we can hit Maddox later, on our own terms, and without him dangling someone we love over our heads.”Jovani leaned back, unease on his face, and said, “There’s one thing I’m really worried about.” He looked to Sal. “The cops.”“They could be a problem,” Sal agreed.“They will be a problem,” Jovani corrected. “They’re not just in Infinite’s pocket. They’re owned by Infinite. There isn’t a cop on th