Chapter 3 - The Surgeon in the Shadows
Norah didn't hesitate. Fear was a luxury for people who didn't have a dying man bleeding on their floorboards.
She dropped to her knees beside him, ignoring the shards of glass cutting into her denim jeans, and pressed both hands directly over the torn tissue of his abdomen. Warm, sticky blood pulsed against her palms.
“Hey!” she shouted toward the open hallway, though she knew the thick soundproofing of the room would swallow her voice. “Hey! Someone get up here!”
No one came. The storm was still raging outside, masking the sounds of the estate, and the third-floor wing was designed to be an absolute vault.
Fine, she thought grimly. I’ll do it myself.
Before she had taken her desk job years ago, before the debt and the failed marriage and the descent into poverty, Norah had spent two years in an accelerated pre-med program before her tuition vanished into her ex-husband’s gambling accounts. She knew anatomy. She knew sterilization. She knew how to stop a bleed.
Dragging herself to her feet, she rushed to the supply cart, ripping open a pack of sterile surgical gloves and snapping them onto her trembling hands. She grabbed a tray of instruments, surgical thread, local anesthetic, and saline wash, rushing back to where Declan lay motionless.
“If you die on me before I get my Friday envelope,” she muttered under her breath, tearing open a suture kit with her teeth, “I swear I’ll haunt you.”
Working with frantic, surgical precision, she cleaned the wound, located the jagged entry point where a hollow-point round had torn through muscle and missed his peritoneal cavity by less than an inch, and began the delicate, agonizing work of closing the tissue.
Declan groaned in his unconscious state, his muscular frame tensing violently as the needle pierced his skin, but he didn't wake.
For forty-five minutes, Norah worked in absolute silence, her forehead slick with sweat, her hands steady despite the adrenaline crash threatening to shake her bones. By the time she tied off the final stitch and slapped a heavy gauze bandage and medical adhesive over the wound, her clothes were stained with his blood, and her arms ached from exertion.
She collapsed back onto her heels, wiping her brow with the back of a gloved hand, looking down at the unconscious crime lord.
Without the cold, predatory edge in his eyes, Declan Hayes looked startlingly human. The sharp angles of his jaw were softened by exhaustion, a dark stubble shadowing his skin, and a faint, jagged scar cutting across his left cheekbone—evidence of a war fought long before he claimed the throne of Bellgrave.
Norah stood up, stripped off the bloody gloves, and tossed them into a biohazard bin. She hauled a heavy woolen blanket from a supply shelf, tossing it over his shivering shoulders, before setting up an IV drip of saline and antibiotics to stabilize his fever.
As she adjusted the drip rate, a heavy, metallic click echoed behind her.
Norah spun around.
Standing in the doorway, blocking the exit with a massive frame and a leveled submachine gun, stood Vance—Declan’s chief enforcer, a mountain of a man with a broken nose and eyes like chipped granite.
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Vance’s gaze darted from the bleeding clothes on the floor to the unconscious boss on the bed, and finally locked onto Norah with lethal, unblinking intent.
“You shouldn't be in this room, maid,” Vance said, his voice a low, threatening growl. “And you definitely shouldn't be breathing.”
