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“Safe house,” I manage instead, because it’s the only useful word left. “Not a hospital. Gunshots get reported.”

“Lupo—”

“If it goes public now, it’s all for nothing—” The world isn’t mine anymore. Not gravity, not this road. My vision shades at the edges. “Nick knows the way.”

“I heard him. Stay awake.” Her thumb finds the pulse at my throat, reads it, and I watch her frown.

“Enzo, floor it. Nick, keep pressure exactly where my hands were, and do not lighten up for the turns.”

“Veda—”

“Stay awake, that’s an order. I outrank you. Now shut up and let me work.”

And she does work. I feel it through the fog—my belt off and cinched above the wound, Enzo’s shirt balled and pressed under her hands, Nick relaying the safe house route into a phone while she times something against her own pulse because there’s no other clock.

She turned around on a clear road with the airport at her back. She should’ve left when she had the chance.

The world goes completely soft now. I still hear Veda’s voice, but I barely feel her hands anymore. Not the words, not exactly. The music of her tones. That stays in my head. In my heart.

If her music is the last thing I hear, it’s more than a man like me deserves.

27

VEDA

No hospital. Of fucking course.

We roll into a warehouse that’s pretending to be a farmhouse, or maybe it’s the reverse. We’re forty minutes from a road that doesn’t appear on maps. The safe house is the kind of place no one wants to need, but you’re grateful when you’re there.

Sectioned-off spaces, a generator, a well, a cellar I don’t ask about. Medical equipment abounds, disorganized. Lighting—I’m trying not to think about the lighting. How they could stock a trauma surgical kit but not some better fluorescent bulbs is beyond me.

Two months ago, this would have terrified me. Tonight it’s the most functional trauma bay available, so I’ve stopped flinching at what these people are equipped for. Lupo’s men have it ready by the time we arrive, because Nick called ahead while pressing both hands into the man I’m keeping alive, and I have never been more grateful for the terrifying competence of criminals.

The drive there was the longest of my life. Lupo’s head in my lap, his belt cinched above the wound, Nick’s hands where I put them, Enzo taking the tracks at a speed that would have killed us on a better night. I kept two fingers on the pulse at Lupo’s throat the whole way and counted, and the number was low, but it stayed there. The only glimmer of hope I’ve had in over an hour.

The setup is a horror, but I will make it work. A steel table under a work lamp. A kit better than I feared, because men in this business get shot and plan accordingly—sutures, clamps, lidocaine, broad-spectrum antibiotics, clotting powder, even fresh units of O-neg in a cooler, which tells me everything about how often this room gets used.

I scrub in a farmhouse sink with surgical soap someone thought to stock. I gown up. And I become the thing I’ve been my whole adult life—the person who does not fall apart because someone in front of her cannot afford it.

Enzo and one of Nick’s men are my OR team. I teach them their jobs in ten-second increments—hold this, don’t let go, tell me the second his color changes—and they obey me the way Sartorre men obey the man on that table, which is absolutely and without question.

It’s a strange thing, but also oddly familiar. In the hospital, my team knows me, I know them, but ordering people is ordering people. However, to command a criminal’s soldiers over said criminal’s open wound while a phone in my pocket holds proof of his crimes feels somehow different.

I don’t think about that during. During, there is only the field, narrowed to the width of the shoddy lamp, the one job, and the refusal that keeps my hands moving. Everything else waits.

The bullet is low on the left. It missed the things that would have killed him in the car and nicked something that will kill him slowly if I don’t find it. I retract the skin a little further back and⁠—

A stream of red arcs over his body. Thin, but there all the same. The bullet nicked the fine artery.

“That’s the bugger.”

“You can do this, right, doc?” Nick rasps. He’s gone pale. Not sure if it’s the night, the carnage, or seeing blood squirt out of his oldest friend that’s doing it.

“Yeah. I can do this.”

My hands do the work my fury is fueling. I trained for exactly this dissociation. In med school, they run you ragged on purpose. Drain you, grind you down to nothing. A lot like military training, or so I’ve been told. Then, they build you back up after proving to you that you can grind through the exhaustion, the pain, the all-nighters, all of it. You can do this, and you will, because people’s lives are on the line.

So, whatever happened outside the OR doesn’t matter. You learn to silo every detail of your life in order to protect the patient. Your focus becomes laser sharp, your ability to ignore your body’s wants and needs grows exponentially.