by Bethany-Kris
JOHN + SIENA: EXTENDED
BETHANY-KRIS
For all my John and Siena lovers …
CONTENTS
JOHN + SIENA: EXTENDED
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS
Copyright
ONE
“Damn, how much did you lose?”
“A solid five-K,” Michel muttered to John’s left.
Andino laughed hard. “I told you that was not the team to bet on, man.”
“Yeah, fuck you, too.”
At the other side of the table, Lev—also known as Pink to almost everybody who didn’t know the man personally—smirked as he reached for the creamer sitting in the middle of the table to add to his steaming black coffee. “I mean, everybody told your stupid ass not to bet on that team, Michel, and yet …”
“I favor the underdogs, that’s all.”
John chuckled. “Just because, at one point in time, you were the underdog doesn’t mean every other underdog will always win.”
Michel sighed, and turned to stare out the window. He knew better than to keep engaging the conversation between his cousins—and Pink, who was just a friend. Well, Lev was an enforcer for Andino who now moved between the main Marcello faction and John’s side of the business in another part of the city.
Sure, John could have easily used one of the men who had shown they were—mostly—trustworthy from the handful of original Calabrese Capos instead of taking one of Andino’s most favored, and loyal, men to keep his faction under control. But hell, sometimes it was good to have someone a man could trust inexplicably to call on when shit needed done or someone had to be watched.
Pink was that guy.
“You know what,” Michel said, drawing John back to the chat at the table, “don’t you have somewhere to be, man?”
John shrugged, resting back in his chair with a warm mug of the best coffee this side of Manhattan between his palms. “Not for another ….” He made a show of checking his watch before giving his cousin a grin that he knew would irk Michel like nothing else. “Well, I’ll have to leave in ten minutes or so to make the meeting and not be terribly late. That’s more than enough time for me to annoy you a little more. Besides, I can stretch it a bit.”
Andino flashed his teeth in a grin. “Nobody says shit to a boss when they show up late, anyway. Everybody else is just early.”
He pointed a finger at his cousin. “Yes, that right there. Exactly that.”
“Fucking hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Laughter rung out over the table, and likely drew in the attention of other patrons of Andino’s restaurant. Every single morning, this was where John came. Sometimes, it was just him and Andino having breakfast or a coffee. Other times, it was all of them. Just like they were right now. Either way, it was a good start to John’s day.
He needed that.
More than people understood.
Routine was still the thing that kept John moving from one thing to the next day after day without spiraling into a chaos of his brain’s making. Sure, the routine had changed a bit from what it used to be—and for the better, if he were being honest—but it still did the same thing for him regardless of what it was.
There was something to be said for the nostalgia of sitting down with old friends for a drink and good conversation. It was something Johnathan Marcello tried to do more often because, next to when he was home with his wife, this was one of the only times when he could actually relax and be himself.
Something that was easier said than done, considering everything. He figured … well, he’d probably earned many of the titles that people called him behind his back. Some were to his benefit, of course, because being the boss of the new Marcello faction—the old Calabrese Cosa Nostra—meant he constantly dealt with men who didn’t know John beyond his last name and the way he’d taken over their famiglia.
They called him crazy.
Unstable.
Not to be crossed.
Before, some of those things might have bothered him. Now, John knew it was better people feared the unknown about him than the things they did know. Everyone else in his life—the people who really mattered like the ones sitting at the table with him or his family spread out across the city—they saw the real John.
He liked that just fine.
“You know what, I was going to come and run interference with you for those bunch of assholes on your side of the city,” Michel muttered under his breath, “but I don’t think I will now. Should let you listen to their whiney asses all on your own.”
“No, you won’t,” John said assuredly, “because Gabbie is in court all day, you’re supposed to be on vacation from the hospital, and you have nothing else better to do with your day. At least with me, you get to play mafia.”
“I don’t play, John.”
Well …
“Yeah, that’s fair,” John replied. “You’re still welcome to join me, though.”
Michel made a noise under his breath. “Probably will. I have nothing better to do.”
Exactly as I thought.
John didn’t say that out loud, however.
“Careful with that,” Andino decided to speak up. Once again sharing a warning he’d already said more than a dozen times to Michel and John since the two started doing business together after he took over the Marcello faction. “You start stepping into a famiglia, Michel, and people might think you want to stay there. Don’t get your place confused unless you’re ready to change it in this business, you know?”
Michel passed John a look.
He said nothing to his cousin.
Shit, he’d been telling Michel this for a while, too. After years of saying he didn’t want to be a made man, it seemed Michel did find something he enjoyed doing in the mafia. That just happened to be running interference between people or showing up in places where John didn’t want to be when the time called for it.
A lot like a consigliere.
Did it mean something?
Maybe.
“We got time to figure it all out,” John said, standing from the table, “but I need to leave, or I’m going to be more than late. You coming?”
Michel nodded at the question, also standing.
Pink stayed sitting.
This time.
Another meeting or situation, and he probably would have got up and went with John, too.
“If you’d just pick an underboss and consigliere from the family,” Andino murmured, picking up his own coffee after letting it cool for most of their breakfast like he usually did, “then you wouldn’t need Pink and Michel to be your go-between, man.”
John gave Andino a look. “It’s handled. It always is.”
“Right. That’s what you keep saying.”
“Because that’s what it is, Andi.”
And that’s how it would stay.
John would make sure of it.
TWO
Siena was dying.
She was sure of it.
Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic, but the thing was, she never got sick. Ever. Colds and flus were practically nonexistent to her. She’d always been too busy to get sick—not that being busy stopped her from catching anything, but she never did.
Until now.
She
regularly got her shots and took vitamins every morning to help give her immune system an added boost. Whether or not those things actually helped to keep her from getting sick, she didn’t know.
Apparently, it didn’t help this time around when a morning cough and a stuffy nose turned into a full-blown chest cold that no over-the-counter medication would help. Only, the chest cold lingered which gave her a throat infection like nothing else. She swore every time she swallowed, it felt like she was swallowing knives.
God.
For the last week and a half, Siena’s bed had become her best friend. Work was out of the question when she couldn’t focus on the computer screen in front of her for long enough to get anything done without her head starting to pound and feel as though it would explode from the pressure building in her sinuses.
Instead, she stayed at home. That killed her a little bit too, if only because she knew that meant work would be constantly piling up for her until she finally got back to it. Then, who even knew if she would be able to get through it all?
Jesus.
Willing the lamp on the bedside table to shut off without her needing to reach over to do it—she didn’t even have the energy for that—as she started coughing again, Siena pulled the blanket tighter around her head. At least then, she could block out the light.
Mostly.
“Still not feeling any better?” came a soft question from the other side of the room.
The very fact Johnathan had returned home without Siena even realizing he was there told her a lot of things. For one, an entire day had passed her by without her even realizing it had happened. A part of her still thought it was far too early in the morning and that’s why the room felt as hot as hell because the morning sun did that to their master bedroom. No wonder she was exhausted—had she even slept, or did she just lay in bed open-mouth breathing and staring at the wall while the time passed?
“Hey,” she heard murmured.
John had crossed the bedroom. Now, he hovered above their bed looking down at her. She could see the concern in his gaze when she didn’t smile or greet him the way she usually would. But frankly, she didn’t even have the damn energy for that.
“I feel like I’m dying,” she croaked.
His brow dipped. “Are you hot?”
“Yes and no.”
“What?”
“It comes and it goes.”
Sometimes, it seemed like she was never going to stop sweating. Other times, she had the chills so bad she could shake the damn bed.
Kneeling at the side of the bed, John pushed the blanket away from Siena a bit so that he could get a better look at her. She wished she could wipe away the worry in his gaze, but even that would take energy she just didn’t have. His palm found her forehead with a soft touch before he stilled, frowning.
Usually, when John came home, it was Siena’s favorite part of the day. The two of them could shut the rest of the world out and pretend like it was just them and nothing else. She needed that time as much as he did. Lately, they hadn’t even been able to have that. While he didn’t say anything about it one way or another, she knew it had to be bothering him.
Hell.
It bothered her.
“Have you checked your temp?”
A rattling cough left Siena. “No. The last time I got out of bed was to pee, and even that took me a half hour. I wasn’t going all the way downstairs just for a thermometer to tell me I am sick and have a fever, John.”
“Babe, you’re really hot.”
And yet, she felt cold.
Funny how that worked.
“Being sick sucks,” she whispered.
“I think maybe we should make another trip—”
“No, I don’t want to go to the hospital again. They’ll make me wear a mask while I wait, and there’s always a whole roomful of people staring at me. I hate it.”
And she did.
So fucking much.
No, Siena would just sit in her bed, fever and cough whatever this hell was out, and deal with it that way. All they would do at the hospital was shove more medications down her throat that wouldn’t help and send her home to battle her sickness alone.
Why bother?
“Siena—”
John didn’t even get to finish his statement before she started coughing. This time, the hacking fit didn’t stop in a few seconds. After a half of a minute, John helped to sit her up in the bed while he reached for the glass of water—who knew how long that had been sitting there—on the bedside table to get her to drink.
Except she couldn’t stop coughing to drink.
Wonderful.
Her husband had also had enough, it seemed.
“That’s it,” John muttered, “you’re going to the fucking hospital.”
Siena couldn’t refuse again.
She was still coughing her guts out.
THREE
Pneumonia.
Fucking pneumonia.
Apparently, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a bad cold to travel into the lungs, but when someone couldn’t expel the fluids … well, that’s when shit became dangerous. John kicked himself again and again over the fact that had he just decided enough was enough a couple days earlier than he had, then his wife wouldn’t have needed to spend time in the hospital taking antibiotics, maxi-mists and getting IVs.
Jesus.
The thing about John that no one really knew was that he liked to indulge Siena a little too much. No matter what she asked for or wanted, he would give it to her if he was capable. And if he couldn’t do it, then chances were he could find someone who would. The same went when she got sick. She didn’t want to go to the hospital, so he didn’t push her to go. He kicked himself in the ass for that now.
It didn’t matter that the rational part of John’s brain told him this wasn’t his fault. Not that Siena had gotten sick, that she was stubborn as hell, or that he was so busy for the last couple of weeks that he’d been willing to not fight with his wife and let her battle through the illness at home instead of taking her into an ER. None of it was his fault, and he knew that. Still, it didn’t stop the part of him that continued to berate himself internally. Until it was all he could hear.
Fuck.
A knock on the private hospital room door had John lifting his head from his palm. The last thing he wanted to do was take his gaze from Siena’s sleeping form in the bed that he knew was damn uncomfortable—considering the amount of times he’d been chained to one of those goddamn things in his later teenage years while they worked to diagnose his bipolar, and he’d been at his worst. Still, he turned to see who had come to the room.
A nurse, he thought.
Maybe a doctor.
All their visitors had come and gone pretty regularly. His parents, siblings, and Siena’s friends. Even his cousins had come to sit with him or their wives came along to bring Siena something to make her smile. Hence why the room was full of fresh flowers and balloons. And yes, every single one made her happy.
So was his wife.
Sweet as could be.
Instead of hospital staff, John was surprised to find his therapist standing in the doorway. Leonard tipped his head down, a silent hello as his gaze darted to the sleeping woman in the bed. He raised a single white eyebrow at John, then; more silent conversation. It never failed to amuse John how well he and Leonard worked together—or rather, how well his therapist seemed to know and understand him without John ever needing to say a thing.
He bet that wasn’t common. Most doctor and patient relationships didn’t go beyond a hospital or counselor’s chair. Leonard, however, made an active effort to involve himself as more than just John’s doctor. He now counted him as a friend.
And God knew he was grateful for the man.
Incredibly so.
“Heard visiting hours are over soon,” Leonard said quietly, mindful of not waking Siena up, “so I suppose I made it in time to see you.”
John chuckled. “I missed a sess
ion, hmm?”
“Well, that’s not why I’m here, of course.”
No, that was probably because John hadn’t called. Leonard only really became concerned that something might be wrong when he didn’t get a phone call. Most times, John made every effort to make each session with Leonard because that was also just a part of his routine. One he enjoyed because for an hour or two a couple of times a week, he was able to sit down and simply focus on nothing but himself.
For someone like John, that had value.
“I just wanted to check in, actually,” Leonard said. “I heard Siena was sick, and made a call to your father to see if I could be of any help. He mentioned you hadn’t left the hospital after she was admitted, so I thought I would come down and speak directly to you instead of about you. I know how you prefer that.”
John grinned. “That I do, and thank you.”
Leonard glanced Siena’s way again. “How is she?”
“A lot better.”
Thankfully.
“Good to hear. And you?”
John sighed. “Feeling like a fuck up.”
“Because she’s sick?”
“Because I … well, a lot of reasons.”
Leonard nodded. “And you know it’s not your fault she’s here, yes?”
“I do.”
“And yet …”
John shrugged. “My brain does what my brain does.”
“Well, try not to beat yourself up too badly. I stopped at the nurse’s station. The doctor on rotation tonight—he’s an old friend. Siena will be discharged tomorrow, I heard.”
“That’s the plan.”
“And then you’ll finally get some sleep, I assume.”
Another smile stretched over his lips. Leonard truly did know John better than he even knew himself sometimes. The man didn’t even have to ask if he was sleeping—he knew he wasn’t.
“Once she’s home,” John murmured.
“And your meds?”
“Andino brought them in.”
Leonard nodded. “What about work—how’s that?”
“Are we condensing a therapy session down to a three-minute conversation now?”
“I do what I can, John, when I can and with what I can. This is me doing a check on you—all points of your life that I know tend to crumble first when you’re not in the best state. However, by all accounts, you seem good at the moment. I still want to check.”