15. Leander
Leander
The automatic glass doors of the emergency bay don't open fast enough.
I kick the center panel with my boot, sending the glass sliding back on its metal tracks with a loud, mechanical screech.
"Out of my way!" I roar into the wide, sterile corridor.
My voice is a raw, terrifying bark that echoes off the high ceilings like a gunshot.
Two junior residents standing near the triage desk jump backward, dropping their clipboards onto the linoleum tile.
Nurse Higgins turns from the medicine cabinet, her face draining of all color the second her eyes land on me.
I'm carrying Kara against my chest. Her cream blazer is soaked in fresh dark blood on the left side, her head resting limp against my shoulder, her body shuddering with every shallow breath she manages to drag into her lungs.
My own arms are covered in red, her blood drying sticky and warm against my forearms and coat collar.
She's bleeding so much.
"Dr. Sartori—" Higgins stammers, stepping forward with her hands up. "What—"
"Trauma Bay One!" I yell, stepping right through her space, shoving a rolling supply cart out of my path so hard it slams into the wall with a deafening crash. "Get me a central line kit, warm saline, three units of O-negative, and get an anesthesia team down here right now!"
"Leander!" a sharp, steady voice cuts through the chaos.
Julian comes bursting out of the scrub room at the end of the hall, his hands dripping with water from the sink.
He takes one look at my face, looks at the blood covering my coat and at Kara, and immediately understands the severity of the situation.
He accelerates into a fast stride, pointing a finger at the floor clerk.
"You heard him!" Julian barks at the clerk. "Call down to the blood bank and tell them to clear Trauma One immediately!"
Julian reaches the gurney inside Bay One a split second before me. He grabs the leather straps, pulling the table flat.
"Set her down, Leander," Julian commands, his tone firm, grounded, and steady. "Set her down gently."
I lay Kara onto the narrow mattress. The secondary spike of pain when her back hits the pad makes her let out a choked, whimpering gasp, her hand reaching up blindly to clutch my forearm.
"I've got you," I whisper, my hands shaking as I grip her fingers. "I'm right here, Kara."
"Get those shears," Julian orders Nurse Higgins, stepping up to the opposite side of the table. He pulls a pair of sterile blue gloves over his hands with two fast snaps. "Let's get this blazer off her right now."
I grab the trauma shears from the side tray myself, my knuckles white as I cut straight through the linen fabric of her blazer and the black silk of her blouse, exposing her left ribcage.
The sight makes the air in my throat turn to glass.
A three-inch laceration sits right over her sixth rib, dark red blood pooling steadily from the jagged edges, mixing with tiny shards of clear glass embedded in the raw skin.
"She took a kick from a boot," I tell Julian, my raspy voice tight, raw, and trembling with a dark, suffocating panic. "Gino booted her into the gravel. Glass broke through the fabric."
"Okay," Julian says, keeping his voice strictly level as he presses a thick stack of sterile gauze firmly against the wound to check the depth. "Okay. Let me see the chest expansion."
"She has fractured ribs on the left," I say, leaning over her, my face inches from hers. "I need a chest tube tray ready in case—"
"Leander," Julian calls, his voice dropping into a quiet, firm register that forces me to look up. "Stop."
"She needs a tube, Julian!" I snap, my eyes dark and wide, my hands hovering over her collarbone like I'm ready to cut her open myself right here on the exam table.
"Look at the monitor, Sartori," Julian commands softly, pointing a gloved finger at the digital display above the bed.
I look up.
Her oxygen saturation is at ninety-seven percent. Her respiratory rate is elevated, but both lungs are expanding evenly. The heart monitor is beeping at a fast, steady ninety-four beats per minute.
"The lung isn't collapsed," Julian tells me, his blue eyes holding mine with absolute authority. "The glass hit the subcutaneous tissue and scraped the periosteum of the rib. It looks bloody as hell because the chest wall is vascular, but the thoracic cavity is intact."
I stare at the monitor, my chest heaving with deep, ragged breaths, my mind struggling to bridge the gap between the frantic terror in my chest and the cold data on the screen.
She's breathing. Her lung didn't drop. Thank God
"I'm giving her five milligrams of midazolam and a low dose of propofol to knock her out," Julian says, nodding to the floor nurse who immediately hooks the syringe into her IV line. "She doesn't need to be awake while I clean the glass out of her side, and she’ll need about twelve sutures."
Kara's eyes flutter softly as the medication takes effect in seconds. Her eyelids grow heavy, her grip on my wrist relaxing until her fingers slip limply onto the sheet.
"Is she under?" I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
"She's completely under," Julian confirms, picking up a pair of surgical tweezers and a basin of sterile saline. "She won't feel a thing."
He looks across the table at me. His eyes drop to my ruined white shirt, my torn coat, and the dark blood covering my hands, most of it not Kara's.
"You're a mess, Leander," Julian mutters softly, his tone shifting into that quiet, personal register. "Where did the rest of that blood come from?"
"Gino," I reply flatly. "And two enforcers Vincenzo sent to her brownstone."
Julian pauses for half a second, his tweezers hovering over the tray, before he resumes working with steady, meticulous movements. "Did you leave them breathing?"
"Gino is unconscious," I reply, my voice dropping an octave, losing every trace of the panic that held me two minutes ago. "The other two are broken on her alley floor."
Julian lets out a slow breath through his nose, wiping a smear of blood away from the edges of Kara's wound. "Vincenzo went after her at her own house?”
"He sent three men to abduct her," I answer.
Julian doesn't look up from his work, but his jaw clenches tight.
"She's going to be fine, Leander. I'm going to irrigate this wound, pull out every speck of glass, close the skin with neat plastic sutures, and wrap her ribs tightly.
She'll wake up in two hours with a minor scar and a severe ache in her side, but she is completely out of danger. "
I stand beside the bed, watching the steady rise and fall of Kara's chest under the white sheet. The monitor beeps rhythmically in the quiet bay.
"Julian," I whisper.
Julian looks up from Kara's side, his eyes narrowing as he reads the total, terrifying shift in my expression.
"I need you to stay in this room," I tell him, my raspy voice carrying a dead, flat weight that makes the air in the trauma bay feel freezing cold. "I need you to lock the doors from the inside, and I need you to make sure no one touches her until I come back."
Julian looks at my face, then looks at my blood-soaked hands. "Nobody gets through that door, Leander," Julian says quietly, his tone absolute. "I'll post two hospital security guards outside the bay, and I'll stay right beside her bed until you walk back in."
"Thank you," I nod.
I reach out, my gloved hand gently brushing a loose strand of dark hair away from Kara's pale forehead. I press my thumb against her temple for one second, feeling the steady, warm pulse beneath her skin.
Sleep, Kara, I think, my dark eyes fixed on her peaceful face. When you wake up, it will be over.
I turn on my heel and walk out of Trauma Bay One.
I walk past the terrified floor nurses, past the silent triage desk, and push through the glass double doors into the cool night air.
The drive to the Moretti estate takes twenty-two minutes.
I hold the leather steering wheel with a loose, steady grip, my mind operating at a cold, mechanical frequency that calculates every movement, every entry point, and every bone I am going to break before sunrise.
When I pull my car onto the gravel driveway of the estate, the iron gates are open for the late-night security shift.
I park my car right in front of the subterranean entrance leading down to the estate's holding cells beneath the north garage, the place Roberto's capos use when they bring in uncooperative union reps or rival enforcers.
I cut the engine, get out of the car, and pop the trunk.
Inside the back, resting beside my spare tire, is a sixteen-inch steel tire iron and a roll of black cloth tape.
I wrap the tape tightly around the handle of the tire iron to give my palm a solid grip, slip the iron bar into my coat pocket, and walk down the concrete ramp toward the basement steel doors.
I push open the iron door. It swings inward on oiled hinges without a sound.
Inside the basement guards' lounge, twelve men are sitting around a long wooden table.
They're wearing dark jackets, leather shoulder holsters, and boots, Vincenzo's personal enforcers and Cosimo's younger riverfront guards.
A deck of cards is spread out on the table alongside three bottles of cheap whiskey.
When the door clicks shut behind me, all twelve heads turn toward the entrance.
"What the hell?" one of the guards near the door mutters, standing up from his chair. His name is Leo, a stocky guy with a shaved head and a thick gold chain around his neck. "Who let you down here, Doc?"
Leo steps toward me, his hand reaching toward the leather holster under his left arm. He looks at my blood-stained shirt, my cold, unblinking eyes, and hesitates for half a second, confused by why Don Roberto's doctor son is standing in their holding cells at two in the morning.
That half-second of confusion is all he gets.