Chapter 11 - THE EMPTY PLANE
Dante refused the ambulance Gabriel had arranged.
"I'm not being moved like luggage."
"This time," Marina said, "you're being moved like a man who needs tests in a hospital nobody in this house controls."
Detective Price assigned two officers to escort them. At the private airstrip, a plane stood fueled with its lights on, though no pilot was aboard. A passenger list named Dante Montenegro, scheduled for transport to a private clinic in Switzerland.
The signature on the authorization looked like his. It wasn't.
"They intended to make me disappear," Dante said.
Price took the documents. "We can prove somebody planned a flight. We're working on the rest."
At the hospital, nurses who didn't know his name helped him onto an examination table. No one called him boss. No one asked permission from Luca. For the first time in months, Dante exhaled.
The tests lasted hours. Marina waited outside because she was not part of the independent care team. When Dr. Shah emerged, she explained the injury was real and serious, but the record calling every pathway permanently destroyed was unsupported. Some motor signals remained. Recovery, if it came, would be uncertain and slow.
Dante listened without interrupting.
"So I wasn't imagining it."
"No," Shah answered. "You weren't."
His phone lit up with a photograph: Luca smiling beside Celeste at the airport lounge.
May you like
Underneath was a message from an unknown number.
Next time we won't leave the pilot behind.
