Chapter 59 Sloane
Sloane
They lay alexis out on the massive kitchen table. Maids run back and forth, squealing and crying. The guy from before, the one who was performing CPR on her, stands beside the table, preparing to begin compressions again.
“Get the fuck away from her!” I bulldoze my way through the people who have followed us in and shove the guy away. “She has a pulse, you idiot!”
“But she isn’t breathing!”
“She is fucking breathing. She’s unconscious because she’s lost too much blood.”
The guy staggers back, running his hands through his hair, smearing blood all over his face. “Jamie’s gonna kill me. Jamie’s gonna murder me,” he says, over and over again. He’s distracting the shit out of me.
“I need…” Fuck, I have nothing that I need here. I left my medical bag at home.
“What? What do you need?” White as a sheet, Alexis’s would-be savior can hardly speak. “Tell me, and I’ll get it for you. Come on!” He’s panicking, just like me.
I take a deep breath and force myself to focus. “A plastic bag. Duct tape. A sewing kit. I need alcohol, prescription drugs, boiling water, towels, tweezers. The sharpest knife you can find. Go.”
Back-alley surgery on my dying sister—that’s what this is turning into.
There’s a reason why doctors never treat family members.
Trauma surgery is an art form. Not many people can do it.
You have to stay calm in the face of extreme pressure.
You have to block out the chaos, the shouting, and everyone else’s panic.
Your hand has to be steady one hundred percent of the time.
No margin for error. Right now, my hands are shaking so badly, I wouldn’t trust myself to hold a fucking pen steady.
“Tell me what happened. Tell me exactly what happened so I can visualize.” The guy has already sprinted off, on a mission to find the items I asked for.
Another guy steps forward, late twenties, wearing a smart shirt and a tie.
He’s also wearing skinny jeans, which seem out of place next to his other business casual attire.
“Soph got shot,” he mumbles, scrubbing his palms against his jeans.
His hands are covered in blood. I want to smash him in his face.
“I can fucking see she’s been shot, asshole! What kind of gun was she shot with? From how far away? From what angle?”
The guy just looks at me blankly. A tall blond woman with piercing green eyes steps forward and answers.
“We were at a meet. It went bad. We copped heat and had to run. Soph got hit with a Glock 22. A.40 caliber. The shot came from about twenty feet away, from the side, like this, but from high up.” She moves to my left, lifting her hand in the shape of a gun, aiming it directly at my chest.
So she was shot from a distance, down and to the right.
The bullet could be anywhere, could have torn absolutely anything apart.
A sense of hopelessness washes over me. If we were in a hospital, if I had a surgical team, if I had a sterile environment, and life support machines, and time, there might be a chance I could save Alexis.
But I am in a domestic kitchen with none of those things…
“Here, I got everything you asked for.” The guy returns, carrying all of the items I’ve asked for in his arms. He dumps everything out on the table next to Alexis, whose shallow, rapid breathing has quickened since she was brought inside.
She’s in shock. And if I cut her open, I’m about to make it ten times worse.
It will probably kill her. The alternative is that I leave her to bleed out on this kitchen table, and that definitely will kill her.
“Naomi?” Zeth’s larger-than-life frame fills the doorway, his face unreadable as he surveys the scene in front of him.
A number of the people in the kitchen turn to see who this newcomer is, but the others remain staring at Alexis.
Soph, the guy called her. They all know her as Soph.
The girls from last night called her that, too.
“What’s going on?” Zeth asks. His voice is a grounding rod.
His presence brings with it a sense of calm that blunts the edge of my hysteria. My hands quit shaking so hard.
“I need the room to be cleared,” I announce.
Zeth nods, and I turn to my patient, snatching up the plastic bag and the duct tape.
I tear the bag using my teeth and lay a square patch of it over the wound in Alexis’s chest. I fix it in place, making sure the plastic and the duct tape form a perfect seal.
“This is her, isn’t it?” Zeth’s voice is the only one in the room now. I hadn’t noticed everyone leave while I worked, but suddenly the silence is deafening.
“Yeah. This is her.” I quickly tell him what the blonde told me, while I hold my hands over my mouth, watching and waiting. I count to twenty, with my hand resting on Lexi’s chest, checking to make sure she’s still breathing.
“Sloane? What are you doing?”
“I need to know if her lung’s been punctured. If it has, air will seep from her lungs. The plastic bag will inflate as it leaves the wound.” Another five seconds. Ten. Alexis is still breathing, but the plastic doesn’t inflate.
“Her lung’s fine.” I rip the plastic bag and tape from her skin. Shame I can’t do a similar triage test to tell if her heart has been grazed. The tachycardia could mean that it has, but it could also just mean that she’s in shock. Which she definitely is.
“Now what?” Zeth is steady. Focused. Alert.
“Now, I have to try and find the bullet.” I press down on Lexi’s stomach, waiting to feel the firmness that might indicate internal bleeding.
Her abdomen is soft, though. If fate is on our side, I might be able to use the tweezers the Widow Maker brought back with him to extract the bullet.
Alexis’s odds will increase a hundredfold if I don’t have to open her up.
Zeth reacts swiftly and decisively, handing me what I need when I ask for it.
I run into problems immediately. The tweezers are too short.
They’re regular cosmetic ones and only reach a couple of inches into the wound.
The alcohol they’ve given me to sterilize with is fucking schnapps.
I have to send Zeth in search of something cleaner.
When he comes back with high-grade Russian vodka, I could kiss him.
But then, Lexi worsens, topping everything off with agonal breathing—a sign that her heart is under massive strain or that her kidneys or liver is failing.
“I don’t know what to do. Fuck!” I’m cracking. I can’t fucking do this. She’s going to die. I’ve worried for years that she’s dead, but she’s been alive. And now she’s dying in front of me, and I can’t save her?
Zeth takes the tweezers out of my hand and stalks around the other side of the kitchen table, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Sloane. Sloane, look at me.”
I don’t. I can’t. I stare at my baby sister’s ashen face as death closes its fist around her. I’m crying, but I can’t feel the tears. Can’t feel my rasping breaths. Grief consumes me as I watch the worst thing imaginable unfolding on the kitchen table in front of me.
“Sloane!” My head cracks to the left, my ears ringing. Zeth slaps me so hard I see stars. His expression is all granite and grit when he says, “She’s dying, Sloane. Think. What comes next?”
“I don’t know which part of her is damaged inside. It could be… it could be her heart. But then it could be… her liver. Or her kidneys. I don’t know.”
“Okay. Let’s use logic. Her lips are turning blue. What does that mean?”
“Hypoxia. Lack of oxygen to the brain.”
“What causes that?”
“Cardiac arrest. Punctured lung. Massive strain on other organs.” Anything. It could be anything.
“It’s not a punctured lung. We already know that. And the trajectory of the wound is down and away from the heart, so it’s unlikely to be damaged there, either. Cardiac arrest could come from damage to the liver and the kidneys?”
“Yes. Caused by excessive bleeding.”
“Okay. So either way we need to open her up, Sloane. We need to see what part of her is bleeding, and we need to fix it.” He hands me the knife the kid found for me—mercifully it’s a scalpel.
And a sharp one at that. God knows who it belongs to or why they have it, but it’s a small mercy.
If the only instrument available to me were a vegetable knife, I’d give up here and now.
“You can do this, Sloane.”
“I can’t! I—”
He shakes me. “I’ve watched you. I’ve seen you perform what other doctors have called miracles. You’re better than this. I know you. You’re an excellent surgeon, and you are not going to let your sister die.”
I glance wildly around the room, trying to disassociate and find a way to not be here, but Zeth takes my face in his hands and holds me still, locking me in his steady gaze. “You’ve got this,” he says.
There isn’t a shadow of doubt on his face. In this moment, he believes in me more than anyone ever has… and a flicker of hope kindles in my chest.
I can do this.
I have to.
A weak gasp from the table steels my nerves. Alexis is fucking dying. She was taken, and I couldn’t do anything about that, but I can do something about this.
“Okay. Okay, all right. I’m ready.”
The next few moments happen in fast-forward. I drench my hands in the alcohol, and then I turn Alexis, giving her back one last look to make sure I haven’t missed the exit wound.
“Holy shit!” Zeth hisses.
It’s a good job I’ve checked. Since bringing her in, a massive, violent purple bruise has bloomed all over her back.
Total renal failure. Definite internal bleeding.
In the weak yellow light from the pendant in the kitchen, I haven’t noticed a discoloration of her skin, but when I lay her flat and check her eyes, the jaundice is clear.
“Kidneys,” Zeth says. It seems he’s not completely unfamiliar with the workings of the human body. I nod, relief making my legs weak. At least when I cut now, I know where the hell I should be cutting.