Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a King
The sound of gunfire was deafening outside the insulated vault.
It wasn't like the movies.
It wasn't a clean, rhythmic popping.
It was a concussive, chest-crushing roar that felt like physical blows against Evelyn’s eardrums.
The air was thick with the suffocating stench of burnt cordite, plaster dust, and blood.
Evelyn didn’t scream.
She lowered her center of gravity, gripping the brass oxygen tank with both hands, and sprinted across the ruined hardwood floor.
The man on top of Adrian was entirely focused on driving his blade through Adrian’s skull.
He didn't hear her coming over the roar of the assault rifles at the foyer.
Evelyn swung the heavy brass cylinder with every ounce of strength in her back, shoulders, and hips.
*Crack.*
The solid metal base of the tank connected with the side of the attacker’s tactical helmet with the sickening crunch of bone and composite plastic.
The man’s head snapped sideways.
His grip on the knife loosened.
Adrian didn’t hesitate for a microsecond.
With his free right hand, he snatched the fallen combat knife from mid-air and drove it upward, beneath the man’s chin, into the base of the skull.
The attacker went limp instantly, collapsing onto Adrian’s chest like a sack of wet sand.
Adrian shoved the dead weight off him with a ragged, bloody heave.
He lay on his back for two seconds, his chest heaving, his mouth open as he dragged air into his lungs.
Blood was pouring from his left side now, pooling beneath him in a terrifying, dark crimson lake.
His stitches were completely gone.
The incision had torn wider, jagged and weeping.
Evelyn dropped to her knees beside him, her hands instantly pressing down onto the open wound.
“You idiot!” she screamed over the gunfire.
“You tore the entire abdominal wall!”
Adrian looked up at her through eyes that were glazed with shock and agony.
A terrible, bloody smile touched his lips.
“You… came out,” he whispered, his voice bubbling with a faint rattle.
“Shut up and hold pressure!” she yelled, leaning her entire body weight onto his flank.
At the far end of the room, the gunfire abruptly ceased.
Dante had finished the remaining two men.
The silence that followed was unnatural, broken only by the crackle of a small fire burning in the shattered remains of a bookcase and the rhythmic, labored gasping of Adrian’s breath.
Dante limped toward them, his face streaked with black soot, his left sleeve torn and soaked in blood from a graze.
“Clear,” Dante croaked.
“Julian, call the clean-up team.”
Croft emerged from the hallway, his face gray as ash, already dialing a satellite phone.
Evelyn didn’t look at either of them.
She looked down at Adrian.
His pulse was thready, fluttering beneath her fingers like a dying bird.
His skin was ice-cold.
“He’s going into hemorrhagic shock,” she said, her voice dropping into that terrifying, icy calm that came over her when a patient was slipping away.
“Dante, the kit. I need the large-bore IV, the plasma expander, and every clamp you have.”
“We can’t do it here,” Dante said, looking at the bodies scattered across the floor.
“Moretti will send a second wave.”
“If we move him now, he dies before the elevator hits the ground floor,” Evelyn said, her voice cutting through the smoke like a laser.
“Bring me the kit, or watch your boss bleed out right here.”
Dante moved.
For the next forty-five minutes, Evelyn Hart performed a miracle in the middle of a slaughterhouse.
She clamped the bleeding vessels with hemostats, her fingers working blind in the pool of his blood.
She started two large-bore IVs in his right arm, pumping saline and plasma directly into his failing circulatory system.
She re-stitched the torn fascia with heavy, brutal knots that would hold even if he moved.
She didn't stop.
She didn't wipe the sweat from her eyes.
She didn't care that her scrubs, her hands, and her face were completely covered in Adrian Vale’s blood.
When she finally stood up, her legs gave out, and she had to catch herself against the edge of the shattered marble island.
Adrian was unconscious, but his breathing was steady.
His pulse had slowed to a stable eighty-five.
His color, though still pale, was no longer the gray of a corpse.
Dante stood over him, looking down at his employer, then slowly turned his head to look at Evelyn.
There was no arrogance left in the bodyguard’s face.
There was no suspicion.
There was only profound, terrifying reverence.
Dante dropped to one knee, dipped his head slightly, and picked up her fallen canvas bag from the floor, placing it gently beside her.
“You saved him,” Dante said, his voice thick with emotion.
“Three times.”
Evelyn looked at her bloody hands.
She felt hollowed out, as if everything she had ever known about herself had been burned away in the fire of the last hour.
She had struck a man with a brass tank.
She had watched a life end two feet from her face without screaming.
She had crossed a line that no hospital code of ethics could ever explain.
Outside, the first faint light of dawn began to creep past the edges of the shattered steel shutters, painting the room in pale, cold lavender.
The city below was waking up.
Buses were starting their routes.
Nurses were arriving for the 7:00 AM shift at St. Matthew’s.
People were drinking coffee and worrying about their mortgages and their utility bills, completely unaware of the war that had just been fought above their heads.
Julian Croft walked over, stepping carefully over the shattered glass.
He held out a warm, damp towel.
Evelyn took it and began wiping the blood from her arms.
“The transport is here, Miss Hart,” Croft said softly.
“A private ambulance with our medical staff.”
“We are moving Mr. Vale to a secure facility in Lake Geneva.”
Evelyn stopped wiping her skin.
She looked at Adrian, who was being carefully lifted onto a tactical stretcher by two heavily armed men in gray uniforms.
“And me?” she asked.
Croft looked at her with those sharp, ancient eyes that had seen forty years of corporate and criminal conquest.
“That depends, Miss Hart.”
“On what?”
May you like
“On whether you are getting into the ambulance with him,” Croft said, “or whether you are going back to Bed Six.”
***
