Page 64 of Sacred Blood

That was Gaby’s voice. I turned down another long tunnel, but couldn’t find either of them. Then another voice keened and another, more and more until there were so many voices, I couldn’t think.

“Stop!” I yelled, coming to a standstill.

The voices stopped, replaced with patients of all ages, some who I knew had died. As I walked through them, they stared blankly at me, but something sinister hung in the air, a threat like at any moment, they would turn on me.

When I came to the end of the tunnel and looked back, everyone was gone. When I turned back around, there were two men standing in front of me, the two Russians from the vehicle, the ones I’d killed, shot dead by my hand. They looked at me, their expressions blank, blood still pouring from the holes in their heads.

“You killed me,” one uttered.

The other nodded. “You did, you killed us. What about your Hippocratic Oath?”

They were right. I had broken my oath to protect life at all costs to save one life. But that one life was worth the world to me.

“I did,” I admitted. “But you took my heart, and no one gets away with taking away what belongs to me.”

They disappeared, and as I turned to go back the way I’d come, there was no longer a tunnel. I was back in the forest and caught a flash of Simba racing ahead of me.

“I’ve got you now, Vinny.”

I chased after my brother until I was able to scoop him up, but when I looked down at the bundle in my arms, it was Gaby. She placed a hand lightly on my jaw.

“Come back to me,” she said, so sweetly.

I bent hungrily to kiss her, only to have her melt away in my arms, but her voice remained.

“Come back, Tano.”

I followed the sound out of the forest into the sunlight.

“Come back.”

“Come back to me, my love. Please, don’t leave me.”

“I’m coming,” I muttered, and the unfamiliar rasp of my own voice woke me. My eyelids rolled back until I saw above me the most beautiful face I’d ever seen, Gabriella’s, and beside her was Vinny.

His face broke into his widest smile. “It’s about damn time, brother. You had us all scared.” He straightened up with his phone in hand. “He’s awake,” I heard him say as he wandered away from my bed. Only then did I realize I was in the infirmary at the family compound. I’d been here countless times, but always as a doctor. This was my first visit as a patient, and I had to admit, the view from the bed was quite different. Even through the haze of medication, instinct had me cataloguing the IV in my arm, the tight pull of bandages across my chest, and the steady rhythm of the monitor beside me.

Vinny continued talking on the phone, but his voice faded into the background. What did I care when my entire world stood at the side of my bed?

“I’m so sorry, Tano. So very sorry!” she cried. Tears tracked down her cheeks and dripped onto my chest. Like a baptism, her tears cleansed me of the fevered nightmare.

“Did they hurt you?” I rasped, touching her face, her shoulders, looking for bruises on the arms she wrapped around me.

She cracked a smile, the sun through her remorse. “No, I’m fine. You saved me from a fate worse than death. He was not a nice man,” she added. “If only I’d stayed put. If only I’d trusted in you. If only I hadn’t been a brat, none of this would have happened!”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Tano is used to brats, eh, brother?” Vinny joined us at my other side, his sunny disposition at odds with his hardened countenance. He was right, he was a brat when we were kids, but I always came through for him. His eyes showed a bit of the worry he felt when he added, “What the hell were you doing in the field? What’s it been, like, twelve years?”

If I wasn’t so tired, I would have told him to fuck off. It wasn’t like I was some old guy trying to get in shape, and it would take a lot more than a decade of surgeries to dim my ingrained senses, but before I could say any of that, the rest of our brothers strode in, bigger than life. I hated being the one in the bed and swore to myself I’d have to get better at honing my mission skills, because I realized one thing during all that happened: We operated better as a team.

For years I'd convinced myself I could keep both worlds separate. In one world, I saved lives.

In the other, I watched my brothers do whatever was necessary to protect our family.

At the airport, those worlds collided.

I hadn't hesitated.

I hadn't questioned it.