Chapter 11 - The Surgeon of Shadows and the Wounded King
He looked like a ghost risen from the ashes of hell.
His black suit was shredded, soaked through with rain, blood, and soot. His left
shoulder was dislocated, hanging at an unnatural angle, and a jagged piece of
shrapnel was embedded in his side just beneath his ribs, dark arterial blood
pumping steadily through his fingers as he pressed against the wound.
Yet he stood upright, his gray eyes burning through the freezing mist with an
intensity that defied human biology.
"Kieran..." I gasped, rising from the mud.
"Mommy, look!" Noah whispered, pointing with a trembling finger. "It's the
giant!"
Kieran looked at Noah, and for a split second, the lethal monster in his posture
softened into pure, unadulterated relief.
"Hey, buddy," Kieran whispered, his voice hoarse from smoke.
Then his eyes flicked to me. "We have two minutes before Thorne’s remaining men
converge on this quadrant. Can you walk?"
"I can walk," I said, stepping forward and immediately wrapping my arm around
his uninjured side to support his massive frame. "Kieran, you're in hypovolemic
shock. You're bleeding out from a thoracic wound!"
"I'll bleed when you're safe," he rasped, gritting his teeth as we moved through
the narrow gap between two shipping containers toward an old, abandoned
maintenance shed at the edge of the rail yard.
We slipped inside the shed, pulling the rusted iron door shut and sliding a
heavy timber across the latch.
The interior was pitch black, smelling of damp sawdust, motor oil, and iron.
Kieran collapsed against the wooden wall, sliding down to the floor, his head
lolling back as his breathing turned shallow and rapid.
"Mila..." he breathed, his skin turning gray and clammy beneath the soot. "In my
inside pocket... encrypted satellite phone... call the private security
frequency... code word 'Blackthorn'..."
"Forget the phone!" I snapped, dropping to my knees beside him in the dark.
I pulled out my penlight, clicking it on between my teeth.
The wound in his side was catastrophic. A piece of jagged steel casing, three
inches long, was lodged between his ninth and tenth ribs. With every shallow
breath he took, air whistled through the wound with a sickening, bubbling hiss.
Tension pneumothorax.
His lung was collapsing. If I didn't decompress his pleural cavity in the next
three minutes, his heart would suffer a fatal shift and arrest right on this
dirt floor.
"Noah," I said, keeping my voice impossibly steady. "Sit in that corner, hold
your bear, and keep your eyes closed until Mommy says so. Okay?"
"Okay, Mommy," Noah whispered, curling into a ball against the wooden crates.
"Kieran," I said, grabbing his face with both hands, forcing him to look at me.
"Listen to my voice! Stay with me!"
"I'm here," he murmured, his eyelids fluttering.
"You have a collapsed lung. I have to pull the steel and perform a needle
decompression. I don't have lidocaine. I don't have sterile instruments. This is
going to hurt more than anything you've ever felt in your life."
A faint, bloody smile touched his lips. "Do it, Nurse Hartley. I trust you."
I pulled the heavy brass pen from his pocket—the same pen I had used as a
tourniquet forty-eight hours ago. I unscrewed the metal casing, discarding the
ink cartridge, leaving a hollow, rigid brass tube with a beveled tip.
I gripped the jagged piece of steel in his side.
"One... two... three."
I wrenched the steel free.
Kieran’s entire body arched off the floor, a guttural, choked roar tearing from
his throat, his hands clamping into fists so tight his knuckles popped.
Without hesitating for a fraction of a second, I aligned the hollow brass pen
casing over the second intercostal space along his midclavicular line and shoved
it through his chest wall with the heel of my hand.
A violent, high-pitched hiss of pressurized air and dark blood sprayed out of
the hollow tube.
Kieran’s chest instantly expanded. He took a massive, shuddering gasp of air,
his oxygen-starved lungs drinking in the freezing dust of the shed as the
pressure on his heart released.
He collapsed back against the wall, panting, alive.
I ripped the hem of my scrub top, creating a three-sided flutter valve over the
improvised chest tube, taping it down with electrical tape from a nearby
workbench.
"You're crazy," Kieran whispered, looking up at me through the dark with awe
shining in his eyes.
"I'm a Chicago ER nurse," I replied, wiping sweat and blood from my forehead.
"Now hold still while I reset your shoulder."
Before he could brace himself, I grabbed his dislocated left wrist, placed my
foot against his armpit, and pulled with steady, leveraged force.
With a heavy, dull CLUNK, the humeral head slipped back into the socket.
Kieran cursed under his breath, his forehead resting against my shoulder as he
breathed through the agony. He reached up with his newly restored left hand, his
fingers tangling into my hair, pulling my mouth down to his.
The kiss tasted of iron, rain, and sheer survival.
"I'm going to marry you, Mila Hartley," he murmured against my lips. "If we live
through tonight, I am putting a ring on your finger and never letting you out of
my sight."
"Survive the next ten minutes, Voss," I whispered back, my eyes burning with
fierce tears. "Then we'll talk about rings."
Suddenly, the encrypted satellite phone in his pocket vibrated with a harsh,
high-priority tone.
Kieran pulled it out, tapping the screen.
A live video feed popped up.
Garrett Voss was standing in the bright fluorescent lobby of St. Clement’s
Medical Center. Standing behind him, handcuffed to the reception desk with a gun
pressed against her temple, was my charge nurse, Patrice.
And in Garrett’s hand was Noah's complete pediatric psychiatric and medical
file, stamped with forged court seals.
May you like
Garrett looked directly into the camera lens, his voice cold and triumphant.
"Kieran. I know you're alive. And I know you have the nurse. You have twenty
minutes to meet me at the Old Navy Pier warehouse alone, or I execute her live
on this channel and submit these forged documents to Child Protective Services.
By sunrise, Mila will be wanted for federal conspiracy, and Noah will belong to
the state."
