Not Your Toy Anymore Chapter 05
In the photo, she was wearing a white coat, leaning into a man — tall, broad-shouldered, smiling down at her. He was holding a little boy on his hip, and all three of them were laughing — unguarded, sunlit, the kind of happy that doesn’t know it’s being watched.
Rafael’s grip on the phone tightened until his knuckles went white. Something hot and vicious tore through his chest.
“Rafael?” The guard’s voice dropped. The man in front of him had turned chalk-white, frozen where he stood.
Rafael didn’t hear him. His eyes hadn’t left the screen.
He knew the man in the photo. Lucian Greco. The most powerful crime boss in New York.
Lucian and Seraphina. Together. With a child.
Every piece snapped into place at once, and every single one of them cut.
Her voice came back to him, every word he’d laughed off. “I’m the surgeon the Don brought in.”
“I came back to operate on—” “I’m pregnant, Rafael. Something’s wrong—”
All of it. Every word. True.
He’d done this. He had driven away the only surgeon who could save his grandfather. He’d let her eyes burn. He’d thrown her phone out a window while she was bleeding on his floor.
“Pull up everything.” His voice came out shredded. “Every record on Seraphina since the day she left L.A. I want it all. Now.”
The panic on his face was feral. Underneath it, something worse — the slow, dawning weight of what he’d done.
He broke into a run. The hallway blurred past him. “Seraphina Greco!”
He threw the ward door open. Empty. Nothing but the sharp bite of disinfectant and something else underneath — faint, metallic. Blood.
The sheets were tangled, half-dragged off the bed. On the floor, a few drops of blood — dark, still wet. Right where she’d gone down.
He grabbed the first nurse he saw. His hands were shaking. “The woman in this room — where did she go?”
The nurse flinched, stammering. “She — she couldn’t even see. She begged me to dial a number for her.”
“A car came for her not long after. She looked awful — pale, hunched over, holding her stomach like she could barely stand.”
“Which way?” His grip tightened without him realizing it. The nurse winced.
His phone rang. ICU.
The doctor on the line sounded like he was barely holding it together. “Rafael, he’s crashing again.”
“He’s in recurring V-fib and we can’t shock him out of it. If we don’t get that surgeon in here, we’re going to lose him.”
The phone nearly slipped from Rafael’s hand. His whole body had started to shake.
Time was running out. And he had no idea where she was.
He tried her number. Punched it in with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking.
Dead air. Then the automated message: The number you have dialed is not available.
Because he’d thrown it out the window himself. It was in pieces on the lawn.
The guard came running back, out of breath, clutching a folder. “I’ve got it. Everything.”
“After she left L.A., St. Aurelia Medical Center in New York accepted her into their surgical fellowship. She trained under Vasily Ivanov — the top cardiac surgeon in the world.”
“Finished her cardiothoracic fellowship three years ago. Deployed with UN peacekeeping medical teams — field hospitals in Syria, Afghanistan. Over three thousand high-risk surgeries. Lead surgeon on every one.”
“Her success rate is off the charts. She has serious connections in the military — people who owe her.” He hesitated. “She married four years ago. Her son, Theo Greco, just turned three.”
“And yes — the Draven family brought her back. She’s the surgeon. She was here to perform the Don’s bypass.”
“Everything was classified. Even the hospital director only had her alias. Nobody here knew who she really was.”
Each sentence hit him like a blow to the chest. And they kept coming.
He’d told himself she’d come crawling back because she had nowhere else to go.
He’d assumed she’d shown up at the villa to get close to him again.
He’d been sure every word out of her mouth was a lie. The truth was, she’d been operating at a level he couldn’t even touch.
And the whole time, he and Zoe had been sneering down at her like they were the ones with something to prove. They were the joke. They’d always been the joke.