Chapter 6
Rico
Darkness isn't quiet. I realize that as I drift somewhere between consciousness and whatever waits beyond it, because even without opening my eyes, I can hear the world moving around me.
Voices reach me through a thick, distorted haze, sometimes close enough that I can almost make out every word and then suddenly distant again, as though I am sinking beneath deep water and the surface keeps moving farther away.
I don't fight it at first. Fighting something I don't understand has never been my way, and there is no reason to start now.
Instead, I listen, separating the sounds one by one, searching for anything familiar enough to give me an anchor.
“His pressure isn't holding.”
“More fluids. Now.”
“Stay with me.”
That last voice cuts through everything else.
Her.
The doctor.
Olivia.
The name surfaces slowly, attached to the woman whose hands have been moving over me for what feels like hours.
I don't remember learning it, which means someone else must have said it while I was slipping in and out of consciousness.
Dario, most likely. Of course he would know her name before I was fully awake.
Dario never walks into a situation without knowing more than everyone else in the room, and even now, with a bullet buried somewhere inside me and my body fighting to keep itself alive, I know he is already working through everything that happened, searching for the weakness hidden inside the attack.
The thought almost makes me smile, but my body refuses to cooperate.
Pain reaches me next, slow at first, spreading through my side and across my chest until every breath feels like it has to push through something heavy.
I remember the gunshot then, not as one clean memory but as scattered pieces that begin falling back into place—the flash, the impact, the sudden heat of blood, the realization that the attack had been too close and too precise to be random.
My mind tries to follow the sequence, but the effort costs more than I can afford, and the darkness pulls at me again before I can finish putting it together.
Then I feel her.
Her hands press against me, steady and deliberate, giving my body something tangible to follow when everything else feels distant.
“Stay with me.”
Her voice is closer now, firm enough to cut through the fog.
It isn't pleading. She isn't asking me to stay because she is afraid of what will happen if I don't. She is telling me to stay because she has decided that I am going to.
That catches my attention.
I try to answer her, but my throat is too dry and my lungs are too weak to give her anything more than a rough breath.
It doesn't matter. I don't need words yet.
I need to listen, and there is something about her voice that makes that easier.
She doesn't waste words when she is working.
Every instruction has a purpose, every movement is deliberate, and even when the pressure around her rises, she doesn't seem to lose control.
Most people become louder when they're afraid.
Olivia becomes quieter.
That tells me more about her than anything else could.
“She isn't leaving.”
Dario's voice reaches me from somewhere nearby.
The meaning settles slowly.
They took her.
Not hired her. Not asked her to come. Took her.
The realization doesn't surprise me. That is how we operate when something matters.
You don't leave a critical piece of the equation to chance.
You secure it, control it, and make certain it remains where you need it until the problem is solved.
It isn't kindness. It isn't morality. It is survival, and survival has never cared much about what is fair.
Except there is something different about hearing it now. Because she isn't one of ours.
She had a life before she walked through these doors. A hospital, patients, routines, people who probably expect her to return. Whatever reason Dario had for bringing her here, she was pulled out of that life without warning and dropped directly into ours.
And yet she hasn't broken.
That is the part I can't stop thinking about.
I force my eyes open again.
This time, they stay open.
The light above me is too bright, blurring everything at first, but gradually the room takes shape. I see the ceiling, the shadows of men moving around the edges of my vision, the indistinct figure of Dario standing several feet away. Then my gaze finds her.
Olivia.
Dark hair pulled back from her face, concentration written across every feature as she works.
There is blood on her hands, my blood, and somehow she doesn't seem bothered by it.
She isn't looking at the men surrounding her.
She isn't looking at the room. She is looking at me as though the rest of the world has ceased to exist.
For a moment, our eyes meet, and something passes between us that I cannot quite explain.
It is not fear, not exactly, although there is enough uncertainty in her expression to tell me she still does not understand what she has walked into.
There is something else there, something quieter and far more unsettling.
Recognition. She knows I am awake, and I know she is the reason I still am.
I have no idea how long she has been fighting to keep me alive, but I can see the evidence in the concentration on her face, in the controlled movements of her hands, in the way she refuses to let exhaustion or the circumstances around her interfere with what needs to be done.
Her attention drops back to my injuries almost immediately, but I keep watching her for as long as I am able.
She never seems to stop moving. Her fingers find my pulse again before she adjusts the pressure, her eyes moving over my face with the kind of practiced attention that tells me she is measuring every change, every breath, every sign that my body is either giving in or fighting back.
Then she gives another quiet instruction to one of the men beside her, and he follows it without question.
That catches my attention.
These men do not take orders easily. They are accustomed to answering to my family, to understanding exactly where they stand and who has earned the right to command them.
Yet this woman speaks, and they move. There is no argument, no hesitation, no challenge to her authority.
She does not need to raise her voice or remind them who she is because, in this room, her competence is enough.
I find myself watching her with something that feels dangerously close to respect.
I do not take orders easily either. Never have.
I have spent my entire life making decisions for myself and expecting the people around me to understand that hesitation can be as dangerous as disobedience.
Yet when she tells me to stay still, when her hands guide me through the pain and her voice cuts through the chaos around us, I listen.
And that realization is far more unsettling than the pain.
“Easy,” she murmurs when another wave of pain tears through me. Her hands press more firmly against my side, and her voice lowers as if she is trying to pull me back from somewhere only she can see. “I've got you.”
I've got you. The words should mean nothing. They don't.
I have spent most of my life understanding exactly what it means to depend on someone else, and I learned early that dependence creates weakness.
You trust someone, they learn where you are vulnerable, and eventually they use it against you.
It is a simple equation, one I have watched prove itself too many times to ignore.
But Olivia doesn't sound like someone making a promise she intends to break. She sounds certain. As though she believes she can keep me here simply because she has decided she will.
My eyes find hers again. This time, I see more clearly.
She isn't fearless. I can see the strain around her eyes, the exhaustion beneath the controlled expression, the subtle tension in her shoulders. She is afraid of something. Maybe not me, but of what happens if she fails. The difference is that she refuses to let that fear dictate what her hands do.
That kind of stubbornness is dangerous. I know something about dangerous people. They aren't always the ones carrying guns.
Sometimes they're the ones who stand in the middle of a room full of armed men and refuse to be intimidated.
My breathing becomes more difficult, and the edges of my vision begin to blur again. I know what is happening before it happens. My body is running out of whatever reserves have been keeping it going, and there is nothing I can do about that from here.
The darkness begins closing around me. This time, I don't panic. I let it come.
Not because I'm ready to die, but because I know the difference between surrender and conserving strength. I have survived too many things to waste what little energy I have left fighting something I cannot overpower.
But before I let myself disappear completely, I hear her voice again.
“Stay with me, Rico.”
My eyes open one last time. She is looking directly at me.
There is determination in her expression, but there is something else there too, something I don't have a name for yet.
Maybe it is simply the responsibility she feels toward a patient.
Maybe it is anger at the men who dragged her here.
Maybe it is the same refusal to surrender that has kept me alive this long.
Whatever it is, I hold onto it.
The darkness takes me again, but it no longer feels like falling into nothing. Her voice follows me down. Her hands remain steady against my skin. And somewhere in the distance, beneath the pain and the exhaustion, one thought remains clear enough to hold.
I am not dying here.
Not before I know who put a bullet in me and betrayed me and the family.
And certainly not before I understand why the woman who should have been a stranger is already becoming the one thing my instincts refuse to let me ignore.