Dario
TWENTY-FOUR
Ed’s body drapes over the edges of my desk. He’s been in and out of consciousness in the past three minutes while I tied him down.
“What… what’s going on?”
“Are you with me, Ed?”
He blinks. The light is low. He’s been in my office before—I had to sew up a stab wound from a particularly wily client of his. When his glassy eyes trail to my face, they bulge. “Doc—”
“You just remembered why you’re here, didn’t you?”
He blinks, then glances away. “Yeah.”
“Good. That means you can answer my questions, and you want to answer my questions, Ed. I promise you that.”
“I… I can’t. He’ll kill me.” No need to ask who he is.
I sigh and smile over him. “Well, I’m killing you right now. So he won’t have the chance.”
Another blink. “What?”
“I imagine it will take a moment to register the fact that it’s not piss in your pants that you’re feeling.”
His brow lines as he concentrates. “It’s my arm that hurts—you fucking shot me—”
“That wasn’t me. That was Lena. As are the cracked and bruised ribs.
If I hadn’t stopped her, she would have fucking beat you to death.
I stopped her for two reasons. One, I don’t know if she could live with herself if she killed a man.
Even you. And two, I have questions. Since you’re losing quite a lot of blood every second—”
“My arm fucking hurts, but I know it ain’t gonna kill me, doc. It ain’t my wrist.”
“Sadly, she only got your shoulder. I think it was the impact from when you slammed your head into the floor that knocked you silly. You’re right that it won’t be fatal.
” I sigh. “But I nicked your femoral artery, and that will be fatal if I don’t patch you up.
So, no need to worry about Marco killing you, because I’ve got that covered. ”
He stares at me. “But you… You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to help—”
I laugh. Hard. “You know who my family is. Do you really think I went to medical school just so I could help people?”
Now with the blinking again.
“You’re losing approximately sixty milliliters per minute.
That sounds manageable and isn’t. At sustained flow, you have roughly twelve minutes before the deficit becomes the kind of problem that doesn’t resolve with sutures.
” I pause. “Under normal circumstances, that is. But you have enough adrenaline coursing through your veins that the bleeding is sped up. And you lost a fair amount of blood thanks to Lena’s shot.
I’d estimate you’ve got two, maybe three minutes left, if you’re lucky. ”
“Fucking hell, I didn’t even wanna do this!”
I look at him with the flat, clinical attention I give patients who require a clear picture of their situation. “I have everything needed to prevent that outcome. All you have to do is cooperate. Can you do that, asshole?”
To his credit, Ed doesn’t beg. I always said he was a serious man, and he’s proving me right. “It was Marco.”
“Tell me everything. Fast.”
It comes out in pieces—not from reluctance but from blood loss that makes it hard to organize his thoughts. “Marco ordered the hit.”
“Since when do shitty street men do hits?”
“He said he wanted this to feel personal.”
That tracks. “Go on.”
“The timeline moved up after the meeting. Marco said I needed to do Lena. Caruso and Bastianich were for you—wait. Where the hell are they? They came in with me—”
I kick Caruso’s body on the floor. “That’s the squealer. Bastianich is over there.” I point to the man’s slumped form next to my door where he can see. “They stopped breathing a little while ago.”
“Fucking hell, doc.”
“What was supposed to happen with Opal?”
He swallows. His face gets paler by the second. “You remember the O’Learys?”
Something in me sinks. “He was gonna put her up for adoption? New name, all that? She’s five. She knows what happened—”
“She wasn’t supposed to. No one was. That’s why Marco’s tech guy cut the power and your backup.”
“And if she did know? What was the plan then?”
Guilt creeps over his face.
I don’t know why I asked the question. I already knew the answer. She would have been taken out alongside us.
“And you were going to follow Marco’s instructions, even after pocketing my cash and running your own operation against him.”
Ed’s jaw shifts. He says nothing. He doesn’t need to.
I pull the suture kit toward me and begin laying out instruments in order—needle, thread, forceps, irrigation syringe—with the methodical calm of a man conducting a familiar procedure.
“I can close the wound. You go back into the living room, and you tell a story I’m going to give you, something a five-year-old will believe, something that ends the evening cleanly and closes it. ”
“What’s that gonna cost me?”
“You’re dying, Ed. What will you pay me to avoid that?”
He gulps. “Go on.”
“Living will cost you loyalty.” I thread the needle. “Alternatively, you decline, in which case I let you bleed out, and I add you to the two men currently on my office floor. Marco wakes up tomorrow to discover that he lost three people and that he pissed me off.”
Ed says nothing.
“You will be useful to me, regardless of your choice. You can be another corpse I made, and anger Marco that way. Or you can become loyal to me, and anger him that way. Make your choice.
Ed looks at his partners for a long moment. A chill works through him. Fear or blood loss, I don’t care. He looks at me. “I’m your guy, doc.”
I get to work.
My hands move independent of where my mind is, which is in the hallway. My beatdown was rough, not gonna lie. But the moment I heard Opal screaming for me, I cut through those men like a warm knife in butter.
And then I saw it. Lena on the floor with a man on top of her and her hands still moving, still fighting, even with that weight bearing down on her.
A red, teary-faced Opal in the doorway with her voice going hoarse.
Books everywhere. Something ceramic that had shattered against the wall or the attacker’s head.
And then a hand grabbed my ankle, and yanked me back into my office.
Bastianich, that tough fucker. I’d thought he was dead, but there was no time to take a pulse and check. Not after I heard Opal.
He pulled me down on top of him and stabbed. Luckily, he was weakened by blood loss, so the stab wasn’t deep after he used all that energy to crawl to the door and pull me back in.
Knife in my side, I slammed his head on my hardwood floor. Had to get the knife out, though. Made it hard to breathe and get a good slam.
Mostly dead, he dragged himself from me while I jerked the knife out. He had just sat up against the wall when I slit his throat with it.
When I came back, they were still there. Still alive. Still okay.
Opal didn’t run. She didn’t hide. She threw everything she could reach at an armed man in the dark, and she screamed for me.
And Lena… fuck. She took it all, fought tooth and nail, and she survived without me. I’m so fucking proud of her that it hurts.
I run a suture, and the thought hits my chest and breaks my heart. I keep working, and my heart reforms, and then I hear Opal’s shattered voice in my mind—Dario! Dario!—and it breaks again.
I keep working. It keeps happening.
“You sure that’s tight, doc?” Ed says, through his teeth.
“I know what I’m doing.”
The O’Learys are an Irish family Marco uses to filter kids in and out of the adoption system. They don’t ask questions. He pays them well. He’s never liked killing kids, and if they’re young enough, he doesn’t.
And Opal saw everything.
I work faster.
Ed is a good patient, to his credit. He doesn’t fuss.
He takes the pain as information rather than an insult, asks a few clarifying questions about the repair, and accepts the answers.
I work steadily, and I tell him what he needs to know about aftercare and what he needs to avoid in the next forty-eight hours.
When I’m done, I set the instruments aside, and I look at him. “You remember what I said?”
“Every word, boss. The story for the kid?”
“A prank that went wrong. No details. Just that you and Lena go way back, and you thought it would be funny to surprise her. She already saw you in the park, so she knows you know each other. She won’t ask too many questions.
You need to seem genuinely apologetic without over-explaining. Can you handle that?”
“Yeah. I got it.”
“Good. Hold still.” I give him an iron shot. “That’ll help your recovery.”
“One more thing,” he says, when I’ve finished.
“Yes?”
“The organization.” He meets my eyes. “It sounds like you got bigger plans than surviving the night, and Marco ain’t gonna be fucking happy that you did. So what happens next?”
“You’re smarter than you look. Or act. Marco underestimated you. I haven’t. You’ll learn my bigger plans when I decide you can. Not yet.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. He nods. “Whatever you say, boss.”
Boss. That’s what everyone called my father.
The smarter ones called my mother that too.
I find I rather like hearing it again.