Chapter 30
SCARLETT
I stay low behind the pillar while the world falls apart around me, when all I want to do is get out there and get my son back.
Bullets are flying everywhere. The noise is so loud my ears feel like they’re bleeding. People are screaming, dying, and I’m pressed against cold stone trying not to throw up or pass out or both.
Dante told me to trust him and stay behind cover. To let him handle this while I hide like some useless damsel waiting to be rescued.
But I’m not useless. I’m a nurse, and right now, about fifteen feet to my left, one of Dante’s men is bleeding out on the cathedral floor.
I can see the wound from here. A deep hole on his thigh.
It’s arterial, from the way the blood is spurting in pulses that match his heartbeat.
He’s got maybe three minutes before he loses too much blood to survive, and nobody is helping him because everyone else is too busy shooting or getting shot.
My nursing instincts are screaming at me to move. My terror for Luca is screaming at me to stay put. For about five seconds, the two impulses war with each other while I watch that man’s blood pool wider and wider on the ancient stone.
Then I make a decision and move. It’s not a wise or conscious one, but my body just goes, crawling on my belly through debris and broken glass, keeping as low as possible while bullets tear through the air above my head.
Something sharp slices my palm and I barely notice.
Something else catches my knee and I ignore it.
The wounded man sees me coming and his eyes go wide. He’s young, maybe twenty-five, with a face that’s already going grey from blood loss.
“Don’t move,” I tell him, my voice coming out steadier than I feel. “I’m a nurse. I’m going to help you.”
“My leg—”
“I know. I can see it.” I’m already pressing both hands against the wound, feeling the hot slick of his blood between my fingers. The pressure makes him scream but I don’t let up. “What’s your name?”
“T-Tony.”
“Okay, Tony. I need you to stay awake for me. Can you do that?”
He nods, teeth gritted, tears running down his face.
I look around for something to use as a tourniquet and realize I’m wearing a belt. Perfect. I yank it off with one hand while keeping pressure with the other, then wrap it around his thigh above the wound and pull it as tight as I can physically manage.
Tony screams again. I ignore it.
“That’s good,” I tell him, watching the spurting slow to a trickle. “That’s really good. You’re doing great.”
“Am I gonna die?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
A bullet chips the stone about two feet from my head and I flinch so hard I almost lose my grip on the tourniquet. But I persist.
“You need to keep pressure on this,” I tell Tony, guiding his hands to the wound. “Press hard. Don’t let it go no matter what.”
“Where are you going?”
“There’s another one.”
Another wounded man, crawling toward me through the chaos, dragging a leg that’s bent at an angle. Legs shouldn’t bend like that. He’s broken a femur, I’m guessing. Either way, he’s not going to make it far on his own.
I crawl to meet him, glass breaking under my knees. Blood that isn’t mine soaks into my clothes. When I reach him, I can see he’s older than Tony. Maybe forty with a wedding ring on his left hand.
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound calm even though my heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. “I’m Scarlett. I’m going to help you.”
“My leg’s fucked,” he gasps.
“Yeah, I can see that. What’s your name?”
“Dom.”
“Okay, Tony. I need to stabilize that leg before you can move. This is going to hurt.”
“Already hurts.”
“It’s going to hurt more. But you’re going to live, and that’s what matters.”
I find a piece of broken pew that’s roughly the right length and use strips torn from my jacket to bind his leg to it.
Makeshift splint. Not pretty, not what I’d do in a hospital with proper equipment and a trauma team backing me up, but it’ll keep the bone from shifting and slicing through his femoral artery.
Dom passes out halfway through, and it’s probably for the best. I check his pulse, and find it weak but present, and I move on.
The next ten minutes are a blur of blood and screaming and desperate medical improvisation to help the men risking their lives to save my son’s.
A third man finds me, this one with shrapnel wounds to his side that are bleeding badly but not arterially. I pack the wounds with strips of cloth and tell him to keep pressure while I check on Tony and Dom.
I save three men. Three men who would have bled out on this cathedral floor if I’d stayed behind that pillar like Dante told me to.
I’m not useless. I’m not helpless. I’m a goddamn nurse and this is what I do.
But the whole time I’m working, the whole time I’m applying pressure and tying tourniquets and keeping men conscious with my voice, part of my brain is tracking the battle around me. Watching for Luca. Listening for his voice.
They go down a corridor, and Dante is trapped behind the alter.
Viktor’s men are falling back and trying to regroup, but not paying attention to the doorway behind them. The doorway that leads to wherever they were taking my son.
I don’t try to weigh the risks or calculate the odds or do any of the sensible things a sensible person would do. I just run.
The distance between my cover and that doorway is maybe thirty feet. But that thirty feet is not ordinary, it’s an open ground with bullets flying in every direction. Thirty feet that could easily get me killed.
But my son might be on the other side, so I run faster than I’ve ever done.
Something whizzes past my ear so close I feel the heat of it, another pulls at my sleeve, and I don’t look down to see if I’m hit. My legs are pumping and my lungs are burning, but the doorway is getting closer. It’s just twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
I dive through the opening and my feet catch on something. Suddenly I’m tumbling, rolling, falling down stone steps that scrape my arms and bang my knees and knock the breath out of me.
I land hard at the bottom, gasping, disoriented, my whole body screaming with fresh pain. But I’m alive, and I got in.
The dark, frigid basement smells like mold and dust. Water drips somewhere in the distance.
My footsteps echo off stone walls that have been down here for over a century.
I can hear gunfire echoing from somewhere deeper in the catacombs, Marco’s team fighting Viktor’s men in the tunnels below.
But that’s not what I’m listening for. I’m listening for my son.
Then I hear it. Crying. Small, terrified, hiccupping sobs that I would recognize anywhere because I’ve been listening to them for five years.
Every nightmare, every scraped knee, every fever dream, every time the thunder got too loud or the dark got too scary, I know exactly what my son sounds like when he’s scared.
“Luca!” I scramble to my feet, ignoring the pain in my everything, and follow the sound. “Luca, baby, where are you?”
“Mama?”
No one else responds, and relief tears through me. He’s alone.
“Mama?”
His voice is coming from behind a door. Old wood, with rusted hinges, and a padlock that looks newer than everything else down here. They locked him in. They locked my five-year-old son in a room in a basement and left him alone in the dark.
I’m going to kill Viktor myself. Slowly and painfully.
“I’m here, baby. I’m right here. Stand back from the door, okay?”
“Okay.”
I look around for something to break the lock with and find a chunk of fallen masonry that’s heavy enough to do the job. Three swings and the padlock gives way, clattering to the floor. I yank the door open and there he is.
My son. My baby. My whole entire world huddled in the corner of a tiny stone room, his dinosaur pajamas dirty and torn, his face streaked with tears and snot, his small body shaking so hard I can hear his teeth chattering from the doorway.
He looks up when the door opens and for a split second there’s raw terror in his eyes. Then he sees it’s me.
“Mama!”
He launches himself at me and I catch him, pulling him against my chest so hard it probably hurts us both. I don’t care. We’re both sobbing, and for a moment nothing else exists except the feel of his small arms wrapped around my neck and his heart beating against mine.
“I’ve got you,” I’m saying, over and over, the words tumbling out between sobs like a prayer. “I’ve got you, baby. Mama’s got you. You’re safe now. I’m here.”
“Mama, Mama, I was so scared.” He’s crying so hard he can barely get the words out. “The bad man took me and it was dark and I couldn’t find you and I thought you weren’t coming.”
“I’m here. I came. I will always come for you, do you understand me? Always.”
I pull back just enough to look at his face, to check him for injuries. My hands are running over his arms, his legs, his head, searching for wounds or bruises or anything that might tell me they hurt him.
“Did they hurt you? Did anyone touch you? Are you okay?”
He shakes his head, still crying. “They were so scary, but they didn’t hit me.”
No injuries and no visible trauma beyond the terror of being kidnapped by strangers. He’s okay. Physically, at least. The psychological damage we’ll deal with later, with therapy and love and time and whatever else it takes to help him heal.
Right now, all that matters is getting him out of here alive.
I don’t know where Viktor went, and we need to get out of here before he comes back.
“Listen to me, baby.” I cup his face in my hands, forcing him to meet my eyes. “We’re going to get out of here, okay? Daddy is upstairs fighting the bad men and we’re going to be safe. But I need you to be brave for me. Can you do that?”
He nods, his lower lip trembling.
“That’s my boy. Now hold onto me and don’t let go.”
I pick him up, settling him on my hip the way I’ve done a thousand times before. He wraps his legs around my waist and buries his face in my neck, and I can feel his tears soaking into my collar.
The gunfire from the catacombs is getting closer. Marco’s team must be pushing through, clearing the tunnels, but there’s still fighting going on. Still danger everywhere I turn.
And above us, through the ceiling, I can hear the battle in the cathedral still raging. The crack of gunshots. The screams of wounded men. The sound of Dante fighting his way toward us.
We’re not safe yet. Not even close.
I tighten my grip on Luca and start moving toward the sounds of Marco’s team. If I can reach them, they can protect us. Get us out of here while Dante finishes the rest off.
But even as I walk, with my son strapped against my chest and feeling his heartbeat against mine, I know the truth.
The bullets are still flying up there. Dante is still fighting, and Viktor is still out there somewhere with his men and his desperation and nothing left to lose.
There’s no safe way out yet.