He Called Her Too Fat for Love in Front of Everyone, but the Curvy Waitress Became the Only Woman Who Could Save Him

Catherine ripped open Dominic’s charcoal jacket, tearing the soaked white linen shirt beneath it.

The wound was high on his left chest—a jagged entrance tear from shrapnel or a glancing round, bubbling with pink froth. *Sucking chest wound.* His trachea was already beginning to deviate toward the right.

“Nico... Wade...” Dominic gasped, his fingers weakly curling into the hem of her wool coat.

“Your driver is alive, but unconscious. The fat one took three to the gut; he needs a surgical suite right now,” Catherine said, her hands moving with lightning speed. She pulled out her phone, dialed 911, and left the line open on the ground: *“Three men shot in the alley behind Bellaforte, Richmond Street. Send multiple trauma units.”*

She hung up before the dispatcher could ask for her name.

She couldn't call an ambulance for Dominic. The hitmen were Cavanaugh men; the moment Dominic Vale’s name pinged on an emergency room dispatch, rival squads would descend upon the hospital to finish the butcher’s work. She knew how the North End operated.

From her bag, she pulled a heavy ballpoint pen and her key ring. She unscrewed the pen's plastic barrel, discarding the ink cartridge to leave a hollow rigid plastic tube. With a clean pocketknife she kept for restaurant prep, she sliced a piece of plastic wrap from a clean sandwich bag in her lunch kit.

“This is going to hurt,” she said, looking down into his glazed, dark eyes. “More than anything you’ve ever felt.”

Dominic couldn't nod, but his jaw clenched.

Catherine positioned the hollow pen casing between his second and third ribs, locked her wrists, and drove it down with firm, steady pressure through the intercostal muscle into the pleural space.

A sharp, hissing pop of trapped air and dark blood hissed out through the plastic barrel.

Dominic’s back arched violently off the cobblestones. A guttural roar of agony tore from his throat, his fingernails digging through the denim of her jeans, drawing blood on her thigh.

“Breathe,” she commanded, holding the makeshift valve steady while applying the plastic wrap as a one-way flutter valve. “Breathe, you stubborn bastard. Come on!”

Dominic took a deep, shuddering gasp. The gray pallor in his cheeks receded slightly; oxygen flooded back into his brain. His eyes snapped wide open, locking onto hers with terrifying intensity.

“You’re... insane,” he breathed, his voice a raspy whisper.

“And you’re alive,” Catherine retorted, wiping blood from her knuckles onto her jeans. “Can you stand?”

“No.”

“Tough. Because the police will be here in three minutes, and whoever ordered this hit has a backup team circling Hanover.”

Catherine stood, planted her boots firmly on the slick stones, bent her knees, and hauled Dominic’s arm over her broad, solid shoulders.

Dominic groaned, a sound of unadulterated torment, but Catherine didn't buckle. She was broad, strong, and her center of gravity was unyielding. Where a smaller woman would have folded under his six-foot-two frame of muscle and dead weight, Catherine bore him up. She took his full weight against her side, her arm locked around his ribs, gripping his belt.

“Walk,” she ordered.

Step by agonizing step, she dragged Boston’s most ruthless crime lord out of the alley, slipping into the maze of dimly lit residential lanes of the North End before sirens began to wail in the distance.

Her apartment was six blocks away, on the top floor of a weathered three-story brick walk-up on Charter Street. By the time they reached the front steps, Dominic was entirely delirious, his head slumped heavily against the crook of her neck, his hot breath smelling of copper and expensive wine.

Every stair was a mountain. Catherine’s thighs burned; her lungs felt as though they were lined with glass. But she did not stop. She couldn't. If she dropped him here, he would die on the cold linoleum of the lobby, and she would spend the rest of her life running from both his enemies and his allies.

She kicked open her apartment door, dragged him inside, and let him collapse onto her worn floral sofa.

The small living room smelled of lavender, old paperback books, and radiator heat. A crocheted blanket hung over the armchair. It was an ordinary, modest, soft sanctuary—the exact opposite of the blood-drenched underworld Dominic commanded.

Dominic lay back against the cushions, his shirt shredded, chest rising and falling with harsh, mechanical regularity.

Catherine didn't hesitate. She threw off her coat, locked the deadbolt, latched the chain, and pulled her old medical kit from under the bathroom sink. It was stocked with suture needles, surgical disinfectant, sterile gauze, and antibiotics—relics of her past life she had never quite been able to throw away.

For the next two hours, Catherine worked in silence.

She irrigated the shrapnel wound with saline, picked out two jagged fragments of lead that had lodged in his pectoralis muscle, and sutured the lacerated flesh with neat, precise stitches. She swapped the pen casing for a sterile chest tube catheter, creating a secure water-seal drainage system using an empty plastic water bottle.

Dominic drifted in and out of consciousness. Whenever the pain spiked, his hand would reach out blindly, finding her forearm, gripping it until her skin bruised. Catherine never flinched. She simply leaned over him, her full, warm figure a steady anchor against the cold tide of his agony.

“Stay still,” she murmured gently, her tone shifting unconsciously to the soft, rhythmic bedside manner she had honed over hundreds of night shifts. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

At 3:00 AM, the bleeding finally stopped. Dominic’s pulse had stabilized to a steady seventy-two beats per minute. Catherine pulled a clean quilt over his broad chest, placed a glass of water on the side table, and collapsed into the armchair opposite him, utterly exhausted.

She watched him sleep.

In the dim light of the streetlamp filtering through the lace curtains, Dominic Vale looked less like a monster and more like a ruined sculpture. The scar through his eyebrow looked pale and jagged. Without the sneer of absolute power on his lips, his face was striking, sharp, and exhausted.

*Why did you do it?* she asked herself, rubbing her aching eyes. *He called you an animal. He humiliated you in front of fifty people.*

She looked down at her hands, still stained with his blood.

*Because I am human,* she thought. *Even if he isn’t.*

A low chime broke the silence.

It was coming from Dominic’s trousers. Catherine reached into his pocket and pulled out a encrypted satellite phone. The screen was flashing with a single name: **MARLOW**.

Catherine hesitated, then swiped the screen and brought the phone to her ear.

“Dominic?” a voice spoke, icy and calculated. Vincent Marlow, the silver-haired adviser from the restaurant. “The sweep team cleared the alley. Nico is in surgery at the safehouse. Kessler is in ICU under guard. But the Cavanaughs are claiming your body was taken. Are you alive?”

Catherine took a breath. “He’s alive.”

There was a dead pause on the line.

“Who is this?” Marlow’s voice dropped an octave, laced with lethal promise.

“The livestock,” Catherine said flatly. “Charter Street, number 42, apartment 3B. Bring a clean car, bring antibiotics, and tell your men not to track mud on my clean floors.”