Lethal Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #5)

1. Ruby

RUBY

The thing nobody warns you about a Brooklyn trauma bay at two in the morning is that it smells like scorched coffee, old bleach, and other people's worst nights, and by your second year you've stopped noticing all three.

I was a few years past that now, which left me noticing exactly one thing: my own feet, which had filed a formal complaint somewhere around hour nine and were now threatening to leave without me.

"When did you actually eat last?" Deysi asked, dropping onto the counter beside me with the easy authority of an ER tech who knew every shortcut in the building and at least one embarrassing secret about every doctor in it.

"There was a granola bar. We had a moment."

"A granola bar isn't food, Ruby. It's a rumor about food." She slid half a cold empanada across the counter like contraband. "Eat. I'm not peeling you off the linoleum at four in the morning."

I ate it. It was glorious, and it was also her dinner, which on the overnight shift is the closest thing we ever get to a love letter.

Over in Bay Three, the serenade had started up again.

Mr. Adley, our most devoted frequent flyer, had turned up for the twelfth time this year convinced his heart was quitting.

His heart was perfect. What had actually failed was the wifi in his building, and a lonely man will take any audience he can find, even one in scrubs.

"Nurse Castillo." He beamed at me across the bay. "Tell the handsome doctor I'm dying."

"You'll outlive this whole hospital, Mr. Adley."

"My heart just skipped. I felt it skip."

"That's the cafeteria coffee, not your heart. I'll bring you a juice."

The handsome doctor was Theo Sutton, a second-year resident with good hands, terrible timing, and the unshakable confidence of a man who had never once lost an argument with his own reflection.

"You're cruel to me, Castillo." He didn't look up from the chart. "I ask you to dinner, you go save a life instead. A man takes that personally."

"You said the word synergy during a code. Out loud. I'm allowed to hold a grudge."

"That was one time."

"Your hands were inside a patient at the time."

Deysi laughed into her coffee. Nothing ever stuck to Theo. Insults ran off him like rain off a waxed hood. I didn't mind him, honestly. He was the kind of trouble that knew to stay in its own lane, which on a night like this practically passes for charm.

I scanned the board. Twelve patients, two of them genuinely sick, one stranded on a psych hold with no bed waiting for him anywhere in the borough. The clock over the doors read a quarter past two. My shift had already swallowed a full day and was eyeing dessert.

"Slow one tonight," Theo said.

Deysi's hand shot out and caught him on the arm. "Do not."

"What did I say?"

"The S-word. You just jinxed every living soul in Brooklyn."

The radio went off before she finished the sentence, because the universe keeps excellent comic timing. Then it cut dead, and that half second of quiet was the worst part of all, because the sound that came next wasn't a radio. It was tires, taking the turn into the bay far too fast.

Headlights swept the glass, riding high and coming in hot. A black SUV nosed up to the automatic doors and stopped a hand's width short, like braking had occurred to somebody late.

"That's not an ambulance," Deysi said, already on her feet.

"No," I said. "That's a problem."

All four doors opened at once. The men who climbed out wore suits that cost more than my car and faces that had never once been softened by a waiting-room form.

They moved like people used to carrying heavy things and expecting to carry more, and two of them leaned into the back and lifted out the heaviest thing yet.

He was enormous. Not a flattering first impression, but you triage with what's in front of you, and what was in front of me was the better part of seven feet of unconscious man, shoulders like a doorway, a charcoal suit gone wet and black down one whole side, where the fabric had quit being fabric and turned into blood.

"Bay Four," I said, and the room snapped into formation around the word, the way it does when the real thing finally walks in. "Let's move."

They brought him in without a gurney, four men and one body, and set him down with a tenderness that fit nothing else about them. I started in before they'd even straightened up.

"What happened to him?"

Nothing.

"Talk to me. How long since he was hit? Did he lose consciousness at the scene?"

The biggest of them finally looked my way. Gray at the temples, and behind the eyes, a whole lot of nothing.

"He was shot. Three times." The accent set each word down with care, the way you'd stack glass. "You fix it."

"Then give me something to work with. Allergies? Conditions? Anything?"

"No allergies."

"A name, at least. I can't chart 'large man, expensive suit.'"

"He doesn't have one tonight."

Right. I cut his shirt instead of arguing, because a name has never once stopped a bleed, and the man on my table was burning through the only currency that counted.

The shears went up the ruined side, the suit fell open, and there was the whole story, told in three small mouths in his skin: two high on the chest, one low beneath the left ribs, where the body keeps the organs it would rather not discuss.

Everybody bleeds the same color in my trauma bay, even the men who arrive with an armed escort and no name for the band. I've scrubbed it off my arms a thousand times, and not once has it told me who had it coming. That's a question for somebody with a bigger paycheck than mine.

Dr. Mercer reached the foot of the bed and stalled out.

On an ordinary night he was a fine attending, thorough, half a step slow.

This was not an ordinary night, and four silent men ringing the bay were doing nothing for his hands.

I watched him add it up, the suits, the size of the patient, the arithmetic of three holes that had no business leaving a man breathing, and I watched the exact moment the sum got bigger than he was.

"Pressure," I said, mostly to hand him a job. "Somebody get me a pressure."

"Palp at seventy," Deysi said.

"Sats?"

"Eighty-one, and sliding."

Eighty-one doesn't sit politely and wait for a plan. I leaned over him and felt the thing the room hadn't said out loud yet. His chest wasn't moving the way a chest is supposed to. The right side climbed. The left barely bothered, like one lung had quietly handed in its notice.

I pressed my stethoscope to him and didn't need long. Breath on the right. On the left, a held note that refused to let go.

"His windpipe's pulling off center," I said. "Tension pneumo, left side. He's drowning in his own air."

"We should get a film," Mercer said.

"He'll be dead before it develops." I was already moving past him. "There's air trapped in his chest, strangling everything that keeps him here. I'm not waiting on radiology to confirm a corpse."

"Tell me what you need." That was Theo, and every trace of the joke had drained out of his voice. I gave him credit for it.

"Large-bore needle, fourteen gauge. Second space, midclavicular. Now, Theo. Not after your next meeting."

He slapped it into my palm. I found the landmark with two fingers, that soft give just above the third rib, and didn't let myself feel the four men watching or the way the leader had gone statue-still. I drove the needle home.

The hiss it gave back was the best thing I'd heard in hours. Trapped air, finding the door at last. His left side rose on the next breath like a sail catching wind.

"Eighty-eight," Deysi said. "Ninety. Look who's back."

I let myself enjoy that for one entire second.

One second turned out to be the whole budget. The monitor changed key mid-breath, the steady beep stretching into one long, flat complaint, and his heart, after surviving three bullets and a collapsed lung, picked that moment to quit on me.

"He's in V-fib," Theo said.

"Two hundred. Charge it." I stacked my hands on his sternum and dropped my weight, and a body that size shoves right back. I put everything I had behind each compression while his blood went slick under my hip. "Don't you dare. You did not take three bullets just to die on my table over paperwork."

"Charged."

"Clear."

He arched and dropped. Flatline, then a flicker, then nothing worth keeping.

"Again. Clear."

The second jolt caught. The rhythm staggered, found its feet, and climbed into something ragged but honest, something I could finally use. His heart had quit for nine seconds. People tell me I take rejection badly.

I didn't look up at the men until his pressure held.

When I finally did, all four had locked onto me, only me, with a weight that held nothing warm in it.

Not gratitude. Gratitude runs hot. This was the cool, patient attention of wolves working out exactly what a sheepdog is worth.

The leader tilted his head a half inch, and somehow it landed like being knighted by a locked door.

"He's stable. For now," I said. "He needs an OR, he needs blood, and he needs a name on that band before he goes up."

"Later," the big one said.

"A wristband doesn't take 'later.' It takes a name."

"He gives the name. Not you."

And that ended it. They didn't argue. They simply declined to move the way I'd asked, which is its own kind of answer, and then the surgical team swept through and carried him off behind the doors with the suits trailing after, and the bay went suddenly too quiet and far too red.

Deysi blew out a breath. "Three gunshot wounds, a suit worth more than my rent, and not one insurance card." Her gloves came off with a snap. "Cool. Normal Tuesday."

"Don't name the day. You'll order us another one."

"Noted. Never again."

Theo was still watching the doors swing shut. "You just saved that man's life. You get that, right?"

"It's the job. It's printed on the badge and everything."

"I'm serious, Ruby."

"So is the badge." But my hands had started to shake now that they were finally allowed to, the adrenaline cashing itself out all at once, and I needed two minutes and a solid wall before the night handed me its next disaster.

The locker room was the only quiet left in the building, one row of dented metal and a bench that had soaked up more confessions than any priest. I spun my combination on muscle memory, three turns I'd done ten thousand times, and opened up for my water bottle, my last clean hair tie, and the photo of my abuela taped inside the door for exactly this kind of night.

A box was sitting on the shelf.

Small. Wrapped. Silver paper, real ribbon, the sort a person has to go out and buy on purpose.

It rested on my folded sweater like it had every right to be there, like I'd set it down and forgotten it, except I hadn't, because I don't wrap things, I've never owned ribbon in my life, and I'd locked this door myself at the top of my shift.

I checked the latch. Solid. I checked the dial, the one that catches a little at twenty-two, a flaw I'd never bothered to report because it was mine and nobody else's problem. Nothing forced. Nothing pried. Nothing out of place but the gift that shouldn't exist.

The card under the ribbon was cream-colored and stiff, no envelope, no name on the front. I told myself to leave it closed. Then I opened it anyway, because the night had already made its character perfectly clear.

Four words, in a careful hand that had pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the paper.

You were magnificent tonight.

I went very still. The break-room fridge hummed through the wall.

Down the hall, a monitor whined for somebody's attention.

I stood there and worked the cold math of who could have reached this shelf, behind a lock set to my own numbers, while both my hands were buried in a stranger's chest one room over.

Every name I tried came back the same. No one could have.

And the box sat there anyway, still warm where my thumb had brushed the paper.

"Ruby." Deysi's head came around the door. "They're taking your John Doe up to the unit. Surgery's calling him a miracle and wants to know who caught the pneumo, because Theo's already taking his bow."

"Of course he is."

"He's practically signing autographs out there."

I tucked the card into my scrub pocket. Later could have it, whenever later turned up. Right now there was a man in the corridor, fresh out of the OR and paper-pale under a thin line of oxygen, and an orderly waiting on me to clear the path, because somehow that lands on me too.

I fell in beside the bed for the short run to the elevators, one hand on the rail out of habit, reading his monitor instead of his face. Pressure holding. Rhythm behaving. Whatever else he was, the man was stubborn, and stubborn is the only prognosis I have ever fully trusted.

Then his eyes opened.

Not the slow climb of a man surfacing off anesthesia. They came open all at once, gray and clear and wide awake, and went straight to me, like he'd known the precise patch of floor I'd be standing on, like he'd been waiting under all that sedation for the chance to look.

His hand came off the mattress and closed around my wrist. There was no reason for the strength in it.

No reason a man who'd been nine seconds dead an hour ago should grip like that.

But his fingers wrapped me and held, not tight enough to hurt, just tight enough to mean it.

I held myself still. You learn the moments for that in this work.

"Easy," I said. "You're safe. You're in a hospital. You made it."

His mouth worked. The voice that came out was low and wrecked, freighted with an accent that turned ordinary words into something carved from stone.

"I will not forget you," he said.

Then his eyes slid shut, his grip loosened, and the orderly rolled him into the elevator. The doors closed over a face that had gone, against all reasonable odds, peaceful.

I stood there rubbing the band of skin where his hand had been. Then, because I'm built the way I'm built, I turned to go back to the dozen other people waiting on me. And that was when I caught it.

Two of the men in suits hadn't gone up with him.

They'd folded themselves into the molded plastic chairs nobody chooses on purpose, parked between a wet cough and a taped ankle and a kid asleep under his mother's coat.

They weren't watching the doors he had vanished through.

They weren't waiting on news of him at all.

They were watching me.