I have learned that there is a particular horror in hearing doctors discuss blood like inventory. Units, loss, pressure, response. Numbers that mean whether the man you love might live or die.
Two days later, they still have him in a medically induced coma.
Two days because they do not want to wake him yet.
His body needs rest, they say. His airway needs to stay protected. The swelling, the blood loss, the trauma, the strain on an injury that should never have been reopened that violently.
They explain it all very reasonably.
I understand every word.
Fuck reasonable. I want him to open his eyes and look at me.
I reach up and carefully brush a strand of dark hair away from his forehead.
“You’re going to be furious when you wake up,” I whisper. “So at least there’s that to look forward to.”
The ventilator hisses softly.
My throat tightens, but I force it down.
I am tired of crying, but I can’t seem to stop it.
I’m even more tired of people looking at me, concerned about my crying, so I’ve been a lot more efficient about it.
A few tears, wiped away before the next doctor comes in, before Teresa steps through the door, before Papà appears with that grief-stricken fury in his eyes and looks at Adrian like he owes him a debt he cannot repay.
I look back at the laptop balanced on my knees.
I should not be working in a hospital room.
Everyone has told me this, but I don’t tell them I am not working.
I am hunting.
The screen is full of documents, corporate filings, property records, old vendor agreements, insurance correspondence, board communications, shell companies stacked inside other shell companies, like someone deliberately built a maze for a person looking to get lost in it.
But not me.
I will not get lost. I cannot.
Because we have no one to question now.
The man Adrian kept alive for questioning is dead.
Because of course he is.
Because nothing can be simple. The one person who might have given us a name, a payment source, a handler, anything, somehow got injured badly enough in the chaos that by the time anyone realized what was happening, he was bleeding internally.
Gone.
One more body, one more dead end.
I do not know what Roberto and Antonio are saying to the police.
I do not know what story is being stitched together around the wreckage of my house, the dead men on my lawn, the armed security teams, the blood in my entry hall, the destroyed table,the children in the bunker, the fact that my siblings and I were almost wiped out in one night.
I should care.
