The Mafia’s Christmas Baby (Claimed for Christmas #2)

Chapter 1

ELISA

St. Adrian’s never sleeps, it just changes tempo.

On the hour, the vending machine coughs up another bag of pretzels.

On the half hour, the drunk tank sings.

Somewhere between the two, the ambulance bay door wheezes open and a gurney barrels in with the kind of urgency that makes every nurse glance up at once.

“GSW. Male. Mid-thirties. Field dressing looks like it was done with a prayer and a bread knife,” the paramedic calls as we swing the doors wide.

I'm already moving.

Gloves on, mask up, cart angled with a practiced hip.

The man on the gurney is pale beneath dried sweat, jaw set like he is holding something back on purpose.

His T-shirt is stuck to his side with blood and somebody’s idea of stitches, a crooked railroad track tugged tight with fishing line.

His eyes flicker under heavy lids.

They are dark, focused, and not as fogged as his vitals suggest they should be.

“On three,” I say, and we roll him to our bed.

The mattress sighs. The overheads blaze. The room tightens around the rhythm we know.

“Two units typed and cross-matched,” I tell Rizzo, who is already hanging the first bag.

She nods without looking at me, curls frizzing out from under her cap like she fought a static monster and lost.

“BP eighty over fifty. Heart rate one-ten,” murmurs the tech at the monitor.

“Sir, can you hear me?” I lean into his line of sight, clean voice, steady tone. “You are in the ER at St. Adrian’s. I’m Elisa. We are going to take care of you. What is your name?”

His mouth tics.

For a second, I think he will say it.

Then he swallows something I can't see.

The move is small but practiced.

“Alright,” I say, because we can do this the hard way too. “Let’s make sure you keep what blood you have left.”

I cut the shirt from hem to collar, scissors working quickly. Cloth falls away in damp curls.

The smell of iron and antiseptic pushes up.

Beneath the mess, the wound is high on the left side, tucked under his ribs.

Whoever tried to close it did not disinfect properly.

The edges are angry. There is still a slow ooze in the middle where the skin has gapped. It needs to be flushed, debrided, and reclosed.

I'm already reaching for saline when something catches my eye along his right side, just below the ribcage.

Ink.

Not just any ink.

A lion with an olive branch between its teeth.

Fine lines.

Old work.

The lion looks like it has never once lost a fight.

My hand pauses for a heartbeat.

My mother’s voice arrives as if it has been waiting in the ceiling vents for a chance to come down.

At Christmas, she would wrap the lights around the banister and tell stories the way other mothers told bedtime tales.

On our street, the Riccaris did not live in books.

They lived above pastry shops and behind black sedans.

They decided who got to open a bakery and who went out to the Bronx to find a new start.

They brought lasagna and sympathy to wakes.

They returned favors on Christmas Eve.

If you saw their crest, you pretended you didn’t.

I blink and it's only a tattoo again.

The lion does not move.

The man under my hands does not groan.

He watches me, not the cut, as if my face is the part that hurts.

“Let’s get this clean,” I say to no one in particular, to the room, to the beating of his pulse under my fingers.

I irrigate with methodical care.

Blood and brownish debris swirl into the basin.

“You got any allergies?” I ask him, because the form wants me to ask even when the form will be blank.

He breathes out. “No.”

His voice is gravelly and low.

It contains something heavy I can't name.

Authority, maybe.

The kind of tone that makes other men listen and makes me straighten without meaning to.

He has an accent that belongs to the corners of Mulberry Street that never gentrified.

Italian, but not tourist-Italian.

Kitchen Italian.

Church-basement Italian.

The kind I grew up hearing through floorboards when my uncle’s friends stayed late after closing.

“Great,” I say, and Rizzo hands me lidocaine like we didn’t both hear the way he said one syllable. “This will sting.”

He does not flinch when the needle goes in.

He keeps his eyes on mine as if he is braced for me to ask another question.

I don't.

It's not that I'm afraid.

It's that sometimes, the safest thing you can do for a man is to keep him a stranger.

The doors swing a second time.

Two uniformed cops sidle into the doorway like they already belong in the chart.

They hold notepads.

They wear faces that say patient confidentiality is a quaint suggestion.

Their belts shine under fluorescent light.

“Evening,” the taller one says, casual, like we’re swapping recipes. “We got a call about a shooting three blocks over. Matches this gentleman’s general look. We’ll just need a name and a quick statement.”

“Evening,” I say, and I don't look up from the wound. “We’ll need to stabilize him before anyone does any talking.”

“Of course.” Pen taps paper. The pen looks impatient. “Name, though.”

“I’ll get you whatever the registrar can legally give you,” I say.

I reach for a new pack of sterile gauze. “Right now, I need the space at the foot of the bed.”

The shorter one considers trying his luck with the other side of the room, then thinks better of it when the attending steps in behind me like a mountain in clean scrubs.

Dr. Kwan has a way of standing that makes men with guns take three polite steps back without realizing it.

He asks for a quick brief, listens with eyes on the wound, and gives three orders that make everything faster.

Labs.

Portable ultrasound.

Keep the transfusion going.

“Mechanism?” he asks me.

“Looks like a through and through graze with bad closure. Left lateral abdomen. No signs of peritoneal violation on first glance,” I say, precise because precision is our currency. “No exit wound we can see. We’ll know more with imaging.”

The patient watches both of us.

Sweat beads along his hairline.

His breathing stays steady even when I probe the wound.

It's the kind of steadiness that is not learned in yoga.

“What is your pain at?” I ask.

He considers the number system like It's a trick. “Four.”

“Optimist,” I say, and the corner of his mouth moves.

The cops are still there when we wheel him to imaging, and they are still there when we bring him back.

They hover just enough to catch names without hearing context.

They ask a nurse who is not me whether the John Doe bracelet is necessary.

She points at the policy sheet taped to her desk and smiles with all her teeth.

In Trauma Two, I set up to redo what someone did with less light and less training.

The lidocaine has taken hold. I dress the wound with the kind of neatness the back room deserves even if the world outside does not.

The needle slips through flesh with a small resistance.

My fingers move.

My brain hums.

The room falls away to the quiet where I live most peacefully, the single task of putting something back together that wishes it could stay broken.

“You are very calm,” the patient says, almost under the sound of the machines.

I tie a knot and cut it clean. “I'm drinking coffee that has been reheated three times. Calm is my only option.”

He huffs a small breath that might be a laugh if he did it when the cops were not watching.

He turns his head to look at the ceiling, then back to me.

For a second, his gaze drops to my name badge.

The name catches there like it's familiar.

Maybe he has bought bread from my Uncle Sal’s bakery.

Maybe we stood on the same sidewalk for the Feast of San Gennaro and watched the saints go by.

In this neighborhood, you can be strangers for twenty years and still know the shape of a person’s back.

“Thank you, Elisa,” he says.

My name on his tongue is gentle.

It should not be.

“Don't thank me yet,” I say. “I still plan to make you walk before I let you leave. If you faint, I'm putting a sticker on your discharge papers that says Dramatic.”

The tech laughs out loud behind his mask.

The patient’s eyes warm by a fraction.

Rizzo presses meds into my palm that will help with the pain if his pride lets him accept them.

He swallows them without argument, which is how I know he is not an idiot.

We keep working.

The ultrasound says no fluid where fluid should not be.

The labs say his blood still likes being inside his body.

The dressing is clean by the second round.

I tape it down and step back to let Kwan check my work.

He glances, nods, and signs off with a neat scrawl.

The cops try another approach.

“Sir,” the tall one says, aiming his politeness like a weapon at the patient’s ear. “If we could just confirm your name for the record. Might help us find whoever did this to you.”

The patient does not look at him.

He keeps his gaze on me, a choice that is either calculated or instinctive.

His voice stays low. “No police.”

“He is allowed to say that,” I say, because someone needs to voice the rules before pride becomes paperwork. “You can take it up with the attending. He will tell you the same thing and use smaller words.”

Kwan does not smile, but his eyes do a thing that makes my night better.

He escorts the officers to the hall to discuss policy in a tone that registers as courteous to human ears and as leave now to anyone with sense.

When the door swings shut, the room opens like a held breath released.

“You grew up here,” the man says to me. It's not a question.

“You say that like my accent gave me away.”

“Your hands did.”

I pause with the chart. “How do my hands give away my zip code?”

“You know how to cut a shirt without cutting the chain beneath it,” he says, and there is humor in his voice now, the kind that rolls in under something heavier. “Only two neighborhoods left in this city where women learn that first.”

“Maybe I'm just talented,” I say. “Don't ruin my brand.”

He watches me sign the paperwork. “You are very talented.”

If I were the kind of woman who blushed at compliments from injured men, this would be the moment where my cheeks go pink.