"It's understandable, of course. No need for apologies."

Ilaria stood and walked nearer to Isabella, leaning casually against the diner counter. 

"I served in the Italian Army. Well, I suppose you could say I was born into it. My father was a commanding General for the Infantry. After nursing school, I didn't really have a choice. I wanted to go on to medical school and become a doctor, but women don't really have the freedom to go into those types of professions back home. So, I entered the army as an officer and worked in the base hospital for eleven years. Finally, I just felt fed up, so I packed my things and left."

The next part of her story still have her a laugh.

"I was in Nevada in a cheap motel answering every ad for a nurse I could. Then I came across one that seemed perfect. Someone was looking for a medical professional to care for his family, and preferred a native Italian. I thought I was going to meet a man, his wife, and children - then I found myself in front of Joseph Ligambi. Different family all together. But, he took me in and gave me a start, then when Adonis took his own crew, Uncle Joe happily let me move here, as he and Adonis had been friends for some time. It's been an unbelievable experience. I never thought I'd come this far."

Worried that she was rattling on too much, she changed gears. 

​​​​​​"I've only met Gavin a few times, but I can tell he's a smart man. A firecracker, for sure."

​​​​​​

The Doctor was definitely more than just a pretty face.  She'd been around a bit and Isabella envied her world travels and the adventures she must have had along the way.  Also, that she had a relationship with her father for her whole life.  

When the Doc spoke about Gavin, Bella gave the barest hint of a smile, her sad eyes brightening a touch.  "It's nice to hear someone say something like that about Gavin.  Most folks underestimate him unless they are speaking about his physical prowess... but he's every bit as sharp as his sister; albeit she has more book learning than he does.  But he's very bright - intuitive, really."

She thought about sitting on the beach with him, by the fire, watching embers float away into the night sky and listening to him talk about his past.  "He's got this wisdom about him, it's ageless... and gentle, not vicious like so many mafioso who I know.  Which, is so odd because he's so damn good at what he does, he could easily have grown into that sort, you know?  One of those guys who gets off on breaking knee caps just because he can; but he's ... different.  He's every bit as powerful and cunning as my father, but he's not the same.  They're alike - but different."

"You have to come to our wedding next weekend.  You and Adonis both."  She said looking out at the moon reflecting on the water.  "We'll have planes to fly everyone to Paris... the reception is at this summer home of King Louis XIV.  It's ... massive.  This lovely hedge mazes and fountains, there will be fireworks and over 10,000 candles lighting the pathways and household and over 2,000 long stem roses.  I just saw the florist's bill yesterday..."  she laughed.  "If my father and step-mother weren't footing the bill for all this I would never have had something so grand... but my father is super traditional.  Right down to the granting wishes of people who come to him on the day of his daughter's wedding.  Lord knows how many mobsters will rape him for their heart's desires that night."

Assuming there is a wedding...

Bella went silent for a long moment until the headlights of a car came up the road, heading away from the docks.  Bella stood up slowly.  A few of the men were already beginning to whisper. 

Is that Tara's car?

Bella whispered, "Please..."  straining to see, trying to make out anyone inside. 

When the car stopped, Neil pulled her away from the window, it was for her own safety but Bella was dying to know.  From her place at the counter she couldn't see if it was them but as some of the men made for the door she knew, it had to be them!

"Is he ... ?"  She asked frantically.

Neil cast a quick smile over his shoulder before going out the door first, obviously making his attempt to be the very first there to assist Tara and Gavin in whatever might be needed.

Bella gave a sigh of relief that caused her shoulders to sink. 

"He's alive."  she said softly, to herself more than anyone.  She hadn't seen what condition he was in yet, but that didn't matter, if Gavin was breathing - he'd live.  She could imagine nothing else. 

For a moment, she thought she might faint and so she settled down onto a chair.  She wanted to run to Gavin, but all the air seemed to be leaving the room at rapid speed.  Bella felt as though she'd run a race, she focused on her breathing and tried to slow it.  He'd be walking through that door any moment now and all would be right with the world again.  

"Tre volte.  Grazie, Signore Gesù, grazie."  Bella muttered, eyes locked on the door, waiting.

As soon as the headlights flooded the windows, Ilaria straightened up and popped open the top flap of the flight bag. She pulled out her stethoscope and looped it behind her neck, then took the pen light from her sleeve and followed Isabella's man outside to meet Gavin, but not before laying a gentle hand on Isabella's shoulder and giving her a confident smile.

Outside, Ilaria's eyes took a moment to adjust to the glare of the street lights, but quickly recognized Gavin Byrne's height and build as a guard helped him out of the car and Tara came around from the other side.

"What's this? I thought I was brought here for dinner and a show."

Ilaria smirked a bit at Gavin, hoping he remembered their casual rapport, but also to see how his mind was. Quick, witty responses meant less chance of brain damage. She looked at the guard and jerked her head toward the doorway.

"Get him in and on the longest table there is, or shove some together."

Moving at pace with Tara and the guard, Ilaria shined the light briefly over Gavin's body, making mental notes of the visual exam. Right away, she saw an alarming amount of blood on his upper leg, near the femoral artery. He looked beaten pretty badly, but cuts and bruises could wait. As they got Gavin inside, Ilaria grabbed her bag and came to Tara's side.

"Good to see you up and about. Haven't seen you since you took ill from the fever. Don't you worry. I've got him now."

With that, Ilaria slung the bag into a chair that had been pulled away and grabbed a roll of instruments. She looked down at Gavin and cracked another joke as she prepped to do a more thorough exam. 

​​​​​​"Hey, Gavin, you tell that pretty lady of yours not to get mad at me for getting you out of these pants, huh?" 

With immediate skill and precision, she took surgical scissors and started cutting a line up his tattered pant leg. 

Isabella watched the men push tables together, slowly standing from her chair.  She winced as if she could feel his pain, as she watched Gavin coming into the room surrounded by people - Neil trying to fuss over him like a mother bird.  God, but that guy adored Gavin almost as much as she did and she couldn't figure that out for the life of her!  

All the people in the room made it impossible to get to him, which she supposed was alright as the Doctor needed access more than she did.  Just knowing he was there had calmed her a great deal.  It was this moment that her eyes met Tara's and she mouthed the words, 'thank you' to her future sister-in-law.  Her gratitude towards Tara knew no bounds at this moment and she really did want to rush over and hug her as well.  But, while Gavin was being put up onto the table, the Doc referenced her.  Suddenly, it was as if all her guys suddenly remembered she was there, parting like the red sea so that Gavin could turn his head and rest his beautiful blue eyes on her at last.

She was dressed in navy colored slacks and a white button-down blouse that only had the tiniest bit of femininity with its darts sewn in just under her breasts.  Her dark hair had been recently cut so that it would have time to grow out a little for the wedding photos, a fair four inches trimmed from its length, was pulled back off her face to give her good vision.  The purpose was easy to see... she was well armed, like every man in this room.  Clearly, she was plan B.

Her hands clenched one another in front of her stomach as her large doe-eyes seemed to take in every possible wound on him, watching the Doc cut away his trousers - eager to know how bad the wound was, but the longer he looked at her the harder it was to focus on his wounds.  Soon her eyes locked on his.  

"Hey, handsome.  You got a date for tonight?" Her words were clearly meant to come out as humor, but her tone suggested she was thinking something entirely different.  She might as well have said, 'I love you' and 'I'm so glad you're alive!' instead.

​​​​​​"Hey, Gavin, you tell that pretty lady of yours not to get mad at me for getting you out of these pants, huh?" 

He chuckled, but seemed far more tired than usual.

"Yea. Good luck with that. And thanks, Doc. Guess I owe you another one."

Gavin glanced at Bella and winked before raising an eyebrow at her guns.

"Yea, I've got plans. I guess we're going somewhere exciting, huh? Sorry to worry you. For once, it wasn't my fault."

Bella wore a playful grin that she felt more and more as the seconds passed.  She scoffed, “Worried?  No! I wasn’t worried. I’m finally just taking my father’s advice about upping my level of security. And I was missing Neil so much I just had to have him come visit, after all I couldn’t have a wedding without Neil there!”

Of course, in all seriousness, there was no fooling him.  He had to know how frightened she was. “Well, maybe I was a little scared. I’m fairly certain there is a no returns policy on my wedding dress & I have grown rather fond of having you around.”

Bella gave a heavy sigh, “I suppose this means he’ll have to take it easy for a while, eh Doc?”  

She shook her head with a smirk, “I suppose I can scrap my plans for us camping on the honeymoon ... you don’t need to be sleeping on hard cold earth after what you’ve been through.  And you won’t be doing anything strenuous for a bit, I think, so I suppose I should make plans to accommodate your needs during our first days of husband and wife.  In sickness and health, as they say...“

She smirked devilish grin that suggested she was hardly put out at the thought of having to care for Gavin‘s needs.  “But for right now you just focus on getting well enough to come home with me tonight.  I haven’t slept a wink and I swore to myself I wouldn’t sleep in our bed until you were home to enjoy it with me.”

“He will be able to come home tonight won’t he, Doc?”

While Isabella and Gavin had their moments, Ilaria quietly set about examining the most worrisome injury. He was either too smitten or too out of it to notice when Ilaria gave him a local anesthetic to numb his leg while she poked around. 

When Isabella spoke to her, though, she looked up and wiped her brow with her forearm. 

"Well, I certainly don't want him sleeping here. From what I can tell, the most damage is to muscle. An inch inwards and the blade would have severed his femoral artery, and there ain't no coming back from that. The muscle will repair itself, with time and rest. And I mean actual rest, Signore. If you want to actually walk down the isle, you need to stay off it until the organ starts playing, capisce?"

She gave him a half smile and patted him on the foot. 

​​​​​​"I'll get you stitched up and look at the rest of your wounds and get you out of here. Ah, but one more thing."

The stethoscope came back out, and Ilaria pressed the pad to his side.

"Deep breath."

He knew the drill. She'd listened to his lungs a dozen times during his treatments. She closed her eyes and sighed softly, nodding.

"Sounds great. Thank goodness for that."

EPILOGUE

🅲🅻🅾🆂🅸🅽🅶 🆃🅷🅴 🅱🅾🅾🅺🆂

"I'll keep your secrets, I'll hold your ground..."

Patrick knelt down inside the confessional, he could hear the window beside him open.  He made the sign of the cross and bowed his head.  "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been three weeks since my last confession."  He whispered, "I accuse myself of the following sins, I have taken the Lord's name in vain four times although to be honest, perhaps it was more... it's been a long couple weeks."

"You just buried your father, my child, the burden of losing one's parents is great.  The Lord understands your pain, you must lean upon him in these times not push him from you."

He swallowed, wishing that he was performing the sacrament with a priest he knew, "I have lied three times to protect a man I knew to be a murderer, if only indirectly, and bore false witness against a man I knew to be innocent."

"Did you?"

He nodded, though the priest could not see it.  "Yes."  He murmured.  "I strongly suspected... but I think I knew all along.  There were too many unanswered questions.  Now more people are dead.  My father, Arthur, Fergus ... Quinn - and what have the lies done?  Brian says he wasn't the reason for Quinn's disappearance at sea, that someone must have gotten to him, and so now he's gone into hiding.  I can't be sure what the truth of that is but it all ties back to the lies, lies told by me and others.  If I'd told Brian what I had thought about those deaths from the beginning, maybe none of this would have happened.  Maybe they'd all still be alive." 

Tears welled in Patrick's eyes, the Priest said nothing and so he went on, "I have a hard time sleeping at night knowing I helped to harm a man who was a victim in all these happenings, and no matter how much I pray about it I just keep thinking I need to do something more but what?  There's no bringing back the dead.  No punishing those who've died... and even those who still feel the echoes of past wrongs have moved on.  And revealing the truth would put our quest for independence, and the lives of many more at risk.  Perhaps the truth is my burden to bear?  My penance for my silence... continued silence?"

He tried to bring his mind back to the task at hand, "I disrespected my father in his final hours.  I wanted this trip I just returned from to be about him making peace with the past.  Instead, all I can hope for now is that with his deathbed confession he goes on to meet the Lord with a clean soul... unburdened of his sins.  I try to make myself feel some sense of ease with that, but it's so very hard when I know how many paid the price for his lies.  How many lives were ruined?  That man, his sister, their mother and all the other families of the dead..."

"And George."  The priest added.

Patrick nodded, tears flowed down his face freely.

"I honestly wanted to think you didn't know.."  The Priest said in a hoarse whisper.  "That maybe you were a pawn in this too ... but you suspected.  And even so, you still went forward with your compatriots in their extension of all the wrongs enacted against the Byrne family."

Patrick wiped his eyes, slowly coming to realize that the Priest who he didn't know, knew a LOT about what he'd been up to.  Some of it he could have known, possibly, but this line of discussion seemed less about helping him enact contrition than it did about something darker.  Slowly Patrick turned his face towards the window, looking at the silhouette there.  His heart stopped.

"Whoever you are... this won't fix anything."  Patrick stammered.

"No."  The shadow pointing a gun at him said in an unconcerned voice.  "But we're long past acts of contrition and forgiveness.  All that's left now, is vengeance."

Gunfire rang out and people fled St. Mary's Cathedral in Belfast, seeking shelter from what was probably just another pointless murder in a very long set of troubles that showed no sign of ending any time soon.  Even men of the cloth were not protected in terrible times such as these.  It was the way of the world and in a few days time, this conflict would be forgotten in the wake of another... and another... and another just like it in which the who, how, or why was so very rarely as clear cut as good vs. evil.

✞———————❖———————✞

Bella was dressed in a sensible business suit, black, with a feminine looking white blouse, her jacket was slung over the back of a chair.  Will had told her to meet with him here at the Blackhawk which was closed during the daytime hours.  She watched as Neil opened the doors for the Philadelphia Don, one of her best friends, and she smiled brightly at him.  Tonight Elie was going to fight her last battle in the Seven Cities Boxing Tournament and they'd be together again to cheer her on.  Gavin was home recovering.  

"Did you put money down on her?  By the time my plane landed they'd closed the books.  I didn't... I KNOW I'm going to be kicking myself tomorrow when she's won big."

Will had come dressed in his white suit and hat, intending to put forth his best public face. This early meeting, however, was something else entirely. He nodded to Neil as he passed and was glad to see the man had stuck around.

"Yeah, I got here in time to get a cool million on her. Probably the easiest bet I've made the whole tourney."

Bella chuckled.  "Shall we have a drink and toast our absolute domination of the Boxing world and Durden's failure?"

"Of course. That's good enough reason to if anything is."

Bella walked around the bar and brought out two glasses and poured herself a bit of gin and tonic.  "What will ya have?  I've got it all back here..."

"Whiskey, straight. It'll be better for what I actually asked you here to discuss."  Even as he spoke, Will reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. He drew out a folded slip of paper and laid it on the table in front of Isabella's seat.

Bella hesitated only a moment then nodded.  She pulled up a large bottle of whiskey and unscrewed the top, poured, and then pushed the glass to Will before tilting her head to the side, looking at the paper.

"Hmmm."  She walked over to the seat and sat down before picking it up to read it.  As she did, she drew a breath and exhaled it slowly.

Will took a deep breath and gave a half-hearted smile. "It seems our friend wasn't doing a credit to his collar after all."

"What's with me and Priests lately... it's as if God wants me to lose my faith and just embrace the life of a Godless pagan.  So it's handled then?"  She folded up the note again and hands it back.

Will takes the note and slides an ashtray over before lighting it and watching it burn like a little candle between the two of them.  "Yes. No loose ends."

Bella takes a VERY long drink and after a moment says, "Thank you for coming to me as you did.  I'm sure she had eyes on me the whole damn time.  I didn't want to act against her... but I couldn't let this pass not after how I failed Elias.  Getting revenge against Garrett was always more about me than him... nothing could undo what was done to him."

Her eyes are dark and sad as she adds, "I just ... the thought of anyone hurting Gavin like that,"  She shook her head.  "I couldn't let them walk away."

"They got what they deserved. Both times. You couldn't help the way things started either time, but you did what you could to make sure they got what they deserved."  He paused, adding, "That's all any of us can do."

Bella smiled a weak but heartfelt grin, "You're a good friend. If you ever need anything... ever... you just have to ask. I mean that. I have a blood debt to you too many times over. We're family, you and me, in all the ways that matter."

Will released her hand and leaned back in his seat with a smile. He took a drink of the whiskey before speaking, "We are family and that's why I don't keep a tab. But you know you're one of the first I'd go to in an emergency. You and Gavin both."

Bella nods and finishes off her gin. "There's family... and then there's Family." She said. "By the end of the week Tara will be both to me... I couldn't have done this without help. Not without making things ... difficult should she learn of it. You didn't have to step in, but you did, and for that I am deeply appreciative. Now at least I can go on my honeymoon without looking over my shoulder the whole damn time. Gavin and Tara's hands are clean of this... as are mine as far as anyone can tell and assuming the guy you hired for the work is all that you claimed, then your hands are too. Are you sure what I gave you was enough? I don't want you carrying any of the bill on this one, it was enough you made all the arrangements."

"It was plenty. You just enjoy your big day and don't worry about any of this. If anyone ought to be giving a gift it's me. After all, you are getting married."

Bella slid off her stool and put a hand on his shoulder, looking him deeply in the eyes. "I'll save you a seat at the gym. I got guys in the kitchen, don't worry about locking up. We've got a big night ahead of us. Our girl is going to win it all and this is just the beginning of all the great things to come. I just know it." She took her hand back. "I'll see you there."

Will grinned again and nodded. All of this was now simply the past. Time to go face the future.