Chapter 3 #2
Hammer, Luca, and their friend Kane had taken Mack and gone to Montana, where they’d fought wildfires because it enabled them to keep below the radar and make sure Maria Sanchez was safe.
They’d done a season in Alaska after that, found Maria’s father, and wrapped up that summer with Kane and Maria engaged.
No one had expected Hammer to be the first to get married after that, but Kane and Maria had already decided to wait until summer this year.
Now his life had changed again. Things were shifting and his friends were moving on. All Luca needed to worry about was making sure they were safe.
Which meant solving this case.
He headed for his desk and fired up the computer, logging onto his email. The message from the US Marshals had been written by Deputy Marshal Ethan Butler, confirming the meeting was set for oh seven thirty at the federal courthouse. In Judge Mullinax’s chambers.
He looked at the address line, seeing who else he could expect at the meeting. One of the names made his breath catch in his throat. No way.
Dr. Kira Yassan.
Luca muttered, “What are you doing here?”
“How’s the kid in four?” Kira stopped at the counter behind which Nurse Rebecca and Nurse Martin sat. The two of them had rolled their stools toward each other and were no doubt discussing last night’s episode of some reality TV show Kira had never seen.
Rebecca shook the mouse and woke up the computer. “His blood work came back clear. And he managed to keep some juice down.”
“That’s good. If he can get some sleep and his numbers are good tomorrow, I’ll be comfortable letting him go home in the morning.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I’m about to hit the cafeteria.” Martin stood. “Did either of you need anything?”
“I’ll go when you get back,” Rebecca said.
Kira shook her head. “I had a big dinner.”
When she needed to stretch her legs later, she would hit the vending machine in the break room and grab herself a diet soda. At three in the morning, the need for caffeine with no sugar was always very real.
The side entrance door down the hall opened, and two EMTs entered, one pushing a wheelchair they used to transport patients. Kira smiled at seeing Mack Jenkins in front, carrying the clipboard, his partner Eric Valletta behind him.
The two men couldn’t be more different. According to Mack, he had some of his mother’s dark features, but it was those serious eyes that made you wonder what he’d seen.
He had the kind of demeanor that gave you the impression he was a quiet guy who considered his words carefully.
Meanwhile, Eric had three kids and an ex-wife and chattered almost incessantly.
She let them check in with Rebecca and do what they needed to do before she met them in the second bay, currently the only one that was open.
So far tonight, they’d treated the victim of a car accident, who’d headed straight up to surgery for the removal of his spleen—something she had done in the back of a pickup truck before—an older man with a broken leg, and the kid in four, who had thrown up all over the table at the restaurant where his family was eating dinner.
Kira pulled back the curtain and waited for them to wheel the patient into the room before she slid it closed. The woman’s shirt had been removed, and the EMTs had a blanket around her shoulders. Her face and hands were a mess of small bruises and lacerations.
Mack looked at the clipboard. “Frankie Hesburgh. Twenty-seven, female. Domestic-violence situation. She’s fifty-seven kilograms. Heart rate, one twenty-seven.
Blood pressure, one thirty over eighty-five, and respirations are rapid and shallow.
Suspected broken ribs, but her chest is clear in all fields.
She didn’t lose consciousness, and no suspected head injury.
We gave her ketamine, fifteen milligrams, slowly over a minute.
The pain returned before we arrived, but we were close enough we held off giving her any more. ”
“Very good.” She nodded, watching Rebecca hook a pulse oximeter to the woman’s index finger. “And the person who did this to her?”
“We left him talking to the police.” She didn’t miss the tone in Eric’s voice, the sound of distaste.
She had to agree, considering that whoever he was, he had done this. Frankie might have fought back, but she was a slight woman who hadn’t been able to match the strength of her attacker.
Kira assisted the patient as she climbed onto the hospital bed, Mack and Eric standing close by.
Mack ended up steadying her arm, and Kira caught the distraught look on his face.
She wasn’t sure that boded well for the kid.
He was new at this EMT thing and had to be able to separate his empathy from the plight of a patient, or every victim would weigh on his heart until it crumbled.
Not that Kira was immune. A child with malaria would always swell up in her a need to not quit until the patient was out of the woods. It was probably a trauma response, but she hadn’t stuck around therapy long enough to unpack the whole issue.
She’d just gone back to work.
Kira slid the stethoscope from around her neck. “Frankie, I’m Dr. Yassan. We’re going to take good care of you, okay?”
The patient nodded, gasping a little and wincing on the inhale.
Kira checked her chest, listening to her breathe, and confirmed that Mack’s read on the situation was likely correct. Possible broken ribs, but no risk of a pneumothorax, where the broken rib would have collapsed the lung.
Kira hooked the stethoscope back around her neck, tugging out her braids. “Rebecca, take all of her vitals again and order a chest X-ray. Let’s give her another fifteen milligrams of ketamine.”
“Yes, Doctor.” Rebecca continued hooking Frankie up to the machines that would enable the nurse to monitor her vitals from behind her desk.
Kira waited a beat, just to see. The patient glanced at her.
Kira said, “You’re safe here. You can get some rest, and we’ll take care of everything else.”
The woman’s eyes fluttered closed.
Kira headed back out to the hallway, where Eric and Mack were filling out paperwork.
She didn’t wish on any unsuspecting member of the public the kind of night where she would be able to lose herself in back-to-back trauma cases.
That would be wishing for someone else to get hurt and suffer immense pain just so that she could be distracted.
But this was a decent shift nonetheless—one where she hadn’t thought much about Destiny’s offer.
Not that it was far from her mind. There might not even be anything to decide now.
She really needed to attend the gala so she could see the whole thing for herself.
Find out what this foundation was really about.
She’d been on the website and everything, and it all looked good on the surface. Something Kira should be invested in. But she still wasn’t entirely convinced.
Kira headed for the soda now so that she could have it close by later when she needed the hit of caffeine. She tugged a couple of dollar bills from her pocket and fed them into the machine.
“You should go down to the cafeteria and at least get a smoothie.”
She glanced over her shoulder and saw Mack swagger over. The kid was far too young for her, but she could tell he was the kind of guy who had been a heartbreaker most of his life. Probably since middle school. He just had that loose-hipped Western style going on, even in his EMT uniform and boots.
Who would have thought she’d ever develop a thing for cowboys?
No, that wasn’t who had captured her attention.
Her soda tumbled to the bottom, and she crouched to retrieve it. “How is your family?”
Since they’d met, every time he stopped by, he’d told her a little bit more about his half brother Hammer.
Sorry, Rowan. As well as Rowan’s wife and their kids.
The whole story about how he’d never known he had a son and now they were expecting a second child.
Everything was all about happily ever after for the Wallace family.
Trying to marry that with the man she had met in a refugee camp in Syria had proven difficult until she’d seen his picture in the paper, holding on to his now wife with their son tucked between them.
Now she knew this was the real guy. The real Rowan.
The man Kira had met overseas was Hammer, the soldier.
“They’re all fine.” Mack shrugged, making his drink selection.
What the kid didn’t know was that Kira knew exactly who he was the first day he rolled in here wearing that same uniform.
Because when she’d looked up the team who’d invaded her life for an hour and forever changed who she was, she’d discovered that Hammer had a half brother.
The same way she’d found out that Luca Saxon’s older brother, Amir, was currently serving time in Texas for unlawful weapon sales.
“Just fine?”
He shrugged, bending for his orange soda. He’d told her all about the past two years, where he’d been fighting wildfires. About the “Trouble Boys” and how they’d saved Maria’s father from terrorists led by the teammate who had betrayed them.
She’d guessed which of the four that’d been, and the newspaper articles she’d read had confirmed it.
“Lexi still hasn’t texted me back.”
“Oh no.” Kira touched his forearm. “I’m sorry.”
He’d told her a few weeks back about the girl he’d met a couple of summers ago in Montana. The daughter of one of the other wildland firefighters. They’d hit it off and stayed in touch. For a while, at least.
“I guess it’s over.” Mack shrugged. “Not that I was all that excited about the long-distance thing, but I thought we were making it work. Building something. We were talking about meeting up for a weekend somewhere in Wyoming. Hanging out.”
“I’d love to give you advice about moving on and keeping yourself open to finding love, but I have no idea how to do that.” She made a face.
After all, she’d been pining for some guy for years now.
Even though she knew he wasn’t dead anymore, that didn’t mean she was going to do anything crazy like look him up.
He thought she’d betrayed him, probably.
Had likely been glad to see the back of her—until she got herself hurt moments later.
What followed was weeks of pain and physical therapy.
Headaches. She’d clawed her way back to health and eventually back to work.
She said, “Seriously, no clue. My love life is pathetic.”
Mack’s lips curled up into a smile. “Are you serious? I’m probably not supposed to say this, because it’s like, against regulations or whatever. But you’re gorgeous, and you should probably know that if you don’t already.”
Kira chuckled. “Thank you.” She nodded her head slightly, but that only drew attention to the sick, ugly scar above her left eyebrow. “It’s nice of you to say.”
“It’s the truth. Even with the scar. Because to be honest, it actually kind of makes you look mysterious and maybe a little vulnerable. It makes me wonder how somebody can go through that and be as strong as you are.”
She didn’t like the traitorous tears that gathered in her eyes, burning and blurring her vision.
Given everything she had been and what she had gone through, there should be no reason for her to react like this.
Or maybe it was simply this man in front of her and the connection she had to that team of heroes.
The kind of people she wanted to be like.
She just hadn’t figured out how to do that.
She knew how to be a doctor, but the rest of it was more like who they were as people, rather than the things they did.
If God had any advice for her on the subject, He’d been surprisingly quiet about it. No matter how many times she’d asked.
Kira touched Mack’s shoulder and spoke a word in her native language because she needed to remember who she was.
“What does that mean?” His head tipped to the side.
“It means ‘thank you.’”
Eric knocked on the open door. “Time to go.”
That sounded like they had another callout to attend. Kira said, “Be safe.”
Meanwhile, she would be here doing the things she knew how to do.
Making a difference across the world had been distilled down to doing the same thing but on a local level.
One patient at a time. She’d made peace with knowing that she would never be a true hero.
Not after everything she’d done for the British government and then, after, for the Americans, until she’d packed it all in and told them no more.
She was done using her skills like that. Done daydreaming about a dark-eyed man she had no business wanting and definitely didn’t plan to run into in a city this size.
After all, if she did run into him…
What on earth would she say?