1
SERAFINA
The gurney crashes into my trauma bay like a wrecking ball at 11:43 p.m.
I'm already gloved.
"What do we have?" I fall into step beside the paramedic without breaking stride.
"GSW times three. Two to the chest, one to the abdomen. BP tanking. Sats in the low eighties." He's sweating through his uniform. "Was conscious on scene. He's not now."
Three men flank the stretcher. Not paramedics. Not cops.
They move with the kind of stillness that costs serious money to learn. Suits too expensive for an ambulance bay. Earpieces in. Faces cut from something harder than bone. They don't look at the patient the way a family does. They don't scan the room the way civilians do.
They're watching the exits.
All three. Simultaneously.
"Name?" I snap at the nearest one.
Nothing.
"Medical history? Allergies?"
Still nothing. Three walls of Italian wool with zero intention of being useful. Private detail — the kind of men who get paid to move bodies and keep mouths shut.
Great. A fucking secret. Just what every trauma bay needs at midnight.
"Then get out of my way."
The man bleeding out on my table is expensive. Even unconscious, even gray at the lips, even with my team descending on him like a controlled hurricane, he reads money. Italian suit, probably Brioni. Silver cufflinks still in. The kind of man who had a driver and a dinner reservation and a very bad decision somewhere between the appetizer and now.
"Two large-bore IVs, type and cross, massive transfusion protocol." I lean in fast. Two chest wounds, one abdominal. The belly shot is the problem. Always the belly. "Free fluid in the abdomen. Get me a portable chest and call the OR."
"BP's sixty over palp," Dani says from the head of the bed. My best trauma nurse. Unflappable. Fast. Built for this.
"Push two units O-neg and keep it there."
My hands don't shake.
People always say it like it's something special.Your hands don't shake, Dr. Virelli.Like they're surprised. Like the fact that my father runs one of the most dangerous crime familieson the Eastern Seaboard means I should be falling apart under pressure.
It's the opposite.
I became a surgeon because of what I grew up inside. Every OR is a room I get to control. Every decision is mine. Nobody bleeds in my trauma bay because of politics or grudges or men who believe blood is a birthright.
I save lives to prove I am nothing like the one I came from.
"He's crashing," Dani says, stating it as simply as a fact.
"Then let's give him a reason to stay."
I crack his chest.
No poetry. No ceremony. Just bone spreaders and the savage focus that silences everything else. The monitors. The noise. The suits watching from the doorway like they're waiting for a verdict.
Everything except the ring.
