Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Mercy Hospital
Inside the swaying, fast-moving van, Hannah didn't hesitate.
She snapped on the latex gloves, prepped an 18-gauge catheter, tied a tourniquet around Nicholas’s upper arm, and found the vein on her first attempt. She spiked a bag of normal saline, hooked up a dose of IV Ceftriaxone from the van’s medical cabinet, and began hanging the fluids.
Nicholas’s heart monitor beeped erratically beside her.
"Where did you learn to set an IV under transport conditions?" Adrian asked, standing near the driver's partition, watching her fingers work with practiced, fluid precision.
"Mercy Hospital Emergency Department," Hannah muttered, cutting away the bloody cloth from Nicholas’s thigh wound. "Four years in EMS, three years in the ER."
"Why are you cleaning floors in Curtis Bay?"
Hannah’s hands paused for a fraction of a second over the wound before she resumed applying sterile pressure sponges.
"Because five years ago, a senior surgeon made a fatal mistake during an emergency airway placement on a senator's son," she said, her voice dropping into a cold, bitter monotone. "He blamed the attending nurse. Me. They revoked my license, scrubbed my records, and threatened me with prison if I spoke to the press. Now, do you want me to scrub this wound, or do you want to keep reading my tragic background check?"
Adrian went silent. He looked at Nicholas, whose breathing was beginning to stabilize as the fluids entered his system.
"His name is Nicholas Vale," Adrian said softly over the hum of the engine. "Six days ago, his second-in-command, Julian Vance, staged a coup. Vance ambushed Nicholas’s motorcade, killed four of our men, and dragged Nicholas into that basement to starve him out until he signed over the digital keys to the harbor shipping registries."
Hannah wiped sweat from Nicholas’s burning forehead. "He was in that basement for three days."
"And if you hadn't walked through that door," Adrian added, his grey eyes locked onto hers, "the Vale syndicate would have fallen by sunrise tomorrow. You didn't just save a man, Hannah. You saved an empire."
Nicholas stirred on the gurney, his hand feebly reaching up toward her apron.
"Hannah..." he rasped.
She leaned down close to his face. "I'm here. Stop talking, your oxygen saturation is still low."
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"Don't... leave," Nicholas whispered, his dark eyes wide with a strange, childlike panic that didn't belong on the face of a ruthless mob chief. "Stay."
Hannah looked at his hand—still holding that worn silver medallion—and felt a strange, terrifying knot tighten in her chest.
