Chapter 5 - The Glass Penthouse
“Shut up,” Evelyn said without looking at his face.
Her fingers were already moving over the wound, pressing with precise, measured force to assess the depth and the angle of the track.
The skin around the entry wound was purple and swollen, hot to the touch.
His breathing was shallow, his pulse racing at roughly a hundred and twenty beats per minute.
“Did it exit?” she asked, leaning down to check his back.
Her hands came away slick with dark red warmth.
“No exit wound,” she muttered.
“That means the slug is lodged against the posterior abdominal wall or caught in the oblique muscle.”
“Can you get it out?” Adrian asked.
His voice remained astonishingly steady, though she felt the violent tremor running through his core every time his diaphragm expanded.
“I am a trauma nurse, Mr. Vale, not a board-certified surgeon.”
“You’ve pulled bullets before.”
“In a sterile operating theater with a general anesthetic, an anesthesiologist monitoring vitals, and a crash cart ten feet away.”
“Not on an Italian leather chair in a penthouse while your bodyguards hover like nervous vultures.”
“You can do it,” he said.
It was not a request.
It was not even a command.
It was an absolute statement of fact, uttered with such profound, unshakeable certainty that it stopped her for a second.
Dante returned with a stack of white Egyptian cotton towels and a first-aid kit that looked like it had been stolen from a military field hospital.
It contained surgical scalpels, sterile gauze, self-retaining retractors, and several vials of injectable lidocaine.
Evelyn looked at the kit, then up at Dante.
“Where did you get this?”
“We prepare for eventualities,” Dante replied grimly.
Evelyn snapped on a pair of sterile latex gloves from the kit.
“Julian, bring that floor lamp closer. I need light directly on his flank.”
The lawyer moved quickly, adjusting the heavy brass lamp until a bright beam of yellow light illuminated the torn flesh.
Evelyn drew ten milliliters of lidocaine into a syringe.
“This is going to sting like a wasp,” she warned Adrian.
“Just do it.”
She sank the needle into the edges of the wound, injecting the local anesthetic in a ring around the puncture.
Adrian’s jaw muscles bunched until the tendons stood out like cables in his neck.
A single drop of sweat rolled down his temple and dropped onto his bare chest, but he did not make a sound.
Not a groan.
Not a hiss.
He simply stared into her face, his gray eyes locked onto hers with terrifying intensity.
“Why didn’t you let them take you to a private clinic?” she asked, waiting for the numbing agent to take effect as she prepped the curved forceps and scalpel.
“Clinics have staff,” Adrian said, his breathing tight.
“Staff talk.”
“A leak right now would cause a run on my company’s shares and trigger three separate investigations by the Department of Justice.”
“Not to mention,” Dante added from the shadows, “Marco Moretti would know Adrian is incapacitated.”
“Moretti?” Evelyn asked, picking up the scalpel.
“A competitor,” Adrian said dryly.
“Hold him,” Evelyn instructed Dante.
“I don’t need to be held,” Adrian countered.
“I’m cutting into muscle tissue without systemic pain management, Mr. Vale,” Evelyn said, her eyes flashing with cold professional authority.
“Your body will reflexively jerk whether your ego wants it to or not.”
“Dante, hold his shoulders.”
Dante placed two massive, heavy hands on Adrian’s shoulders, pinning him firmly back against the leather seat.
Evelyn took a breath.
The familiar calm of the emergency bay settled over her, blocking out the high-rise view, the expensive artwork, and the bizarre unreality of the situation.
There was only the tissue, the blood, and the foreign object that didn't belong.
She widened the entry wound with a clean, two-centimeter incision.
Blood welled up immediately, spilling over the towels she had packed around his side.
“Suction would be nice,” she muttered to herself, using sterile gauze to pack and clear the field.
Adrian’s knuckles went pure white where he gripped the arms of the chair.
The veins in his forearms stood out like ropes.
His eyes never left her face.
She probed the wound track with the forceps, feeling the resistance of the torn muscle fibers.
*Click.*
The metal tip of the instrument tapped against lead.
“Found it,” she murmured.
“It’s deep. Just behind the iliac crest.”
She carefully spread the forceps, sliding the tips around the slug.
Adrian’s chest heaved.
A low, guttural growl tore from his throat—the first sound of genuine pain he had allowed himself to make.
“Almost,” she said, her voice dropping into the soothing, rhythmic tone she used for children in the trauma bay.
“Stay with me, Adrian. Don’t move.”
She used his first name without thinking.
His eyes dilated slightly at the sound of it.
With a slow, firm twist, she pulled the forceps back through the track.
The deformed, flattened piece of lead emerged from the wound with a wet suction sound.
She dropped it into the silver bowl.
It clattered against the metal with a sharp, ringing chime.
“Bullet out,” she announced.
She immediately packed the tract with hemostatic gauze to stop the deep bleeding, then spent the next twelve minutes meticulously stitching the muscle fascia and the skin with nylon sutures.
Her stitches were small, neat, and perfectly spaced.
When she tied the final knot and snipped the thread, she let out a long, ragged exhale that she felt in her very bones.
She cleaned the surrounding skin with saline, applied an antibacterial dressing, and taped it down securely.
She peeled off her bloody gloves and dropped them into the trash bin.
Her hands were trembling again.
Adrian leaned back against the headrest, his hair damp with sweat, his skin pale as paper, but the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest was deeper now.
More natural.
He looked at the bloody slug sitting in the silver bowl on the table.
Then he looked at her.
“You’re very good at your job, Miss Hart.”
“And you’re very bad at staying alive,” she shot back, collapsing onto a nearby sofa and rubbing her temples.
“You need antibiotics. You need IV fluids. You lost at least two units of blood.”
“We have fluids,” Croft said, stepping forward with an IV bag and tubing.
“I’ll hang it,” Evelyn said, standing up on weary legs.
“Then I am going home.”
Adrian reached out.
His right hand, strong and warm despite his blood loss, caught her wrist.
His fingers closed around her pulse point.
“You’re not going home tonight, Evelyn.”
She looked down at his grip.
“Excuse me?”
“Moretti’s men were watching the hospital,” Adrian said quietly.
“They saw Dante pick you up.”
May you like
“If you go back to Belden tonight, you won’t survive until sunrise.”
***
