🩹 Her Hidden Bruises Made the Mafia Boss Break Every Rule for Love

Chapter 03 - The Badge and the Lie

I stared at the badge as if it had crawled there on its own.

My face smiled up from the plastic rectangle. Amanda Wells, RN. Mount Sinai Hospital. The photo had been taken three years earlier, before Ryan, before skipping meals, before I learned that silence could become a survival skill.

“That was on me last night,” I said.

Ryan’s eyebrows drew together with public concern. “Amanda, you were confused. You probably dropped it at home.”

“No.”

The word came out stronger.

His eyes narrowed just enough for me to know I would pay for it later, if later existed.

Aleandro reached for the badge. Ryan moved as if to stop him, then thought better of it.

“Where was she at 2:14?” Aleandro asked Marco.

“In the car with you, sir. Coming up Park Avenue.”

“And before that?”

“On the F train. I was behind you from West Fourth.”

Ryan’s gaze flicked to Marco. “How convenient.”

“Convenient would be you leaving before I lose patience,” Marco said.

Aleandro raised one hand without looking at him, and Marco fell silent.

“Ryan,” Aleandro said. “You will tell me how you got her badge.”

Ryan smiled again, but it had begun to sweat at the edges. “I don’t answer to you.”

“No. Not yet.”

Something in those two words made the air change.

I had spent months afraid of Ryan’s anger. It filled rooms quickly, loudly, like smoke. Aleandro’s anger was different. It moved underground. You felt the floor tremble before you heard a thing.

Ryan must have felt it too, because he took a step back.

“This is a mistake,” he said. “She’s mine to take home.”

“She belongs to herself.”

The sentence was so simple I almost missed its violence. Not against Ryan. Against the lie I had been living inside.

I looked at Aleandro.

He did not look back, but his body shifted a fraction, placing more of himself between Ryan and me.

Ryan’s mask finally cracked.

“You don’t know what she’s done.”

“I know what was done to her.”

“You saw some bruises and built yourself a rescue fantasy. She lies. She steals. She manipulates men into thinking she’s helpless.” He turned to me then. “Tell him, Amanda. Tell him what happens when you don’t take your medication.”

My stomach dropped.

“I don’t take medication.”

Ryan looked wounded for the audience. “Sweetheart.”

“I don’t.”

Aleandro’s voice came low. “What medication?”

“There is none,” I said.

Ryan sighed. “She was diagnosed with anxiety and episodes. Dissociation. Her doctor can confirm.”

I shook my head. “He made me see his doctor once. After I threatened to leave. The man asked three questions and wrote a prescription I never filled.”

“You filled it,” Ryan said. “You forget things.”

“Stop saying that.”

My hands curled into the sleeves of Aleandro’s jacket. I hated that Ryan could still make the room tilt without touching me.

Marco’s phone rang. He listened, expression hardening.

“Sir,” he said, covering the receiver. “Your contact at Mount Sinai says the pharmacy camera shows Amanda entering storage. Same height, same hair, same coat.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“Send the footage,” Aleandro ordered.

Ryan’s confidence returned. “See? I tried to handle this privately. She needs help.”

The video arrived on Marco’s phone.

We watched in silence.

The footage was grainy, gray, angled from above. A woman in a beige coat entered the hall outside the pharmacy. Her dark hair hung in a loose ponytail. She kept her head down and moved with purpose. At the door, she swiped my badge.

Access granted.

She stepped inside.

I felt the blood leave my face.

“It looks like me,” I whispered.

Aleandro took the phone and rewound the footage.

Again.

On the fourth time, his thumb paused the frame just as the woman turned slightly toward the keypad.

“No,” he said.

Ryan’s smile faded.

Aleandro enlarged the image. The woman’s face remained blurred, but her left hand was visible near the badge reader.

“She is wearing a ring,” Aleandro said.

I leaned closer.

A silver ring. Thick band. Black stone.

“I don’t own anything like that.”

Ryan’s jaw shifted.

Aleandro noticed.

“Who is she?”

“No one.”

The answer came too fast.

Marco moved toward Ryan. “Try again.”

Ryan lifted both hands. “Fine. My sister Nina has a similar coat. Maybe she borrowed Amanda’s badge. I don’t know.”

His sister.

Nina Cole, who had visited our apartment twice and looked at me as though poverty were contagious. Nina, who worked freelance events and always needed cash. Nina, who once asked how easy it was to access hospital supply rooms.

I sat down because my legs had gone weak.

Ryan had not just hurt me.

He had built a version of me the world could punish.

Aleandro looked at the badge, then at Ryan.

“You came here with evidence you knew was false.”

“I came here to protect her.”

“No,” Aleandro said. “You came to see whether she remembered enough to defend herself.”

Ryan’s phone buzzed on the coffee table where Marco had placed it after taking it from him downstairs. The screen lit up with a message from a contact named N.

Did Raldi bite?

None of us spoke.

Then a second message appeared.

If not, tell him the nurse still has what his father died looking for.

Aleandro’s hand closed around the phone.

His face emptied of every human expression.

Ryan looked at me then, and for the first time, I saw fear in him.

Not fear of me.

I thought of all the small things Ryan had borrowed and never returned. A charger. A key. My patience. My certainty. Each item disappeared so gradually that objecting felt petty by the time I noticed. That was how he worked. He did not kick down the door of my life; he moved the furniture two inches at a time until I no longer recognized the room.

My badge was worse than any of those things. It was not jewelry, not a keepsake, not a scrap of plastic. It was years of night classes, clinical rotations, exams taken on no sleep, my father's proud face when I pinned it to my shirt for the first time. It was proof that before I became Ryan's problem, I had been Amanda Wells, registered nurse, steady hands, clean record.