Chapter 8 - The Clinical Line
Dileia didn't lift her hands from Julian’s chest. She delivered another heavy, rhythmic compression, the bone beneath her palms groaning under the force. "You're a fool, Aldis," she said, her voice completely steady as she kept her gray eyes fixed on the gun barrel. "The aconitine you bought from the Palermo docks has a molecular weight that flags the automated toxicity routers within twelve seconds of ingestion. The state police lines are already closed between here and the river bridge."
"The state police answer to the people who buy their patrol cars, girl," Pike spat, taking two steps into the clean, white room, his shoes leaving two brown streaks of slush on the epoxy floor. "Now move away from his chest or I’ll ensure your niece has to find another kitchen for her pancakes."
Beneath Dileia’s knees, Julian’s chest gave a sudden, subterranean heave. His right hand—the one that had been limp against the sheets—snapped outward with the fluid, silent speed of an iron piston, his fingers catching the gold frame of Pike’s glasses and driving the metal into the doctor's eyes.
Pike screamed, his weapon firing a single, deafening round into the ceiling tiles as he stumbled backward, a cloud of white plaster dust raining down over his blue jumpsuit.
Dileia didn't look at the gun. She snatched the external pacer pads from the tray Leo had just kicked through the doorway, driving the adhesive gel pads directly onto Julian’s wet chest skin.
"Clear!" she barked.
She hit the button on the console. A hundred and fifty joules of electrical current surged through Julian’s conductive pathways, lifting his massive frame off the mattress by three inches before slamming him back into the linen.
The monitor let out a sharp, high-pitched chirp.
Beep... beep... beep...
The rhythm returned—one hundred beats a minute, regular, sinus, and entirely steady.
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Julian sat up, the pacer wires trailing from his skin like black cables, his winter-sea eyes clear, dark, and filled with a violence that made the plaster dust around him look like smoke. He didn't look at Pike, who was currently clutching his bleeding face on the floorboards; he looked directly at Dileia, his hand reaching out to catch her neck, dragging her mouth down to his with a rough, desperate hunger that tasted of copper and survival.
"I told you, nurse," Julian whispered against her lips, his chest heaving under her hands. "The watch never closes."
