Not on my patient. On his guard. The one by the door shifts his weight, and light catches the heavy silver seal on his right hand. A serpent coiled around a sword, engraved deep into the metal.
Every nerve in my body fires at once.
Moretti operatives. Not family. No Moretti is sitting in the back of an ambulance playing bodyguard at midnight. Hired men wearing the family crest because someone higher up wants the room to know who they answer to.
Which means the man on my table isn't a Moretti either.
He's someone important enough to warrant their protection and expendable enough to take three bullets.
I know that crest the way every Virelli child knows it. Not from history books. From dinner tables and hushed warnings and the particular way my father's face went to stone whenever the name came up.
The Morettis and the Virellis have been tearing apart New York for decades. I left all of it behind when I was eighteen. Packed for California and never looked back.
Apparently, that life just wheeled itself into my trauma bay on a gurney.
Of course it did.
I don't react. Years of surgical training and a childhood spent learning to keep my face blank mean I'm very skilled at feeling seventeen things and showing none of them. Maybe the only useful thing my father ever taught me.
"Pressure's climbing," someone calls. "Seventy systolic."
"Keep pushing." I find the bleeding left internal mammary, shred it, clamp it. "Warm blanket. Another unit."
Whatever this man was carrying or running from, it doesn't matter in here. He's a patient. That's the only thing he gets to be in my bay.
I repeat it to myself until it almost sounds true.
He wakesup when I have no business expecting it.
Pressure's at eighty. Bleeding controlled. I'm sixty seconds from declaring him stable enough for the OR when his hand moves. Deliberate. Searching.
It clamps around my wrist with a grip that has no right existing in a man this close to death.
"Hey." I lean in. "You're at Bellevue Hospital. You're stable. I need you to?—"
His eyes find mine.
Brown. Blown wide. Terrified in a way that has nothing to do with the bullets.
He's not looking at the room. Not the nurses, not the monitors, not his own men at the door.
He's looking at me. Like he's been searching for me.
Recognition flashes across his face. Sharp. Deliberate. He knows who I am. Not a guess. Not a hope. The certainty of a man who studied a photograph, memorized a shift schedule, and planned for this moment weeks before a bullet put him on my table.
His free hand presses something small and hard into my scrub pocket. Deliberate. Intentional.
A choice.
"The war." His voice is destroyed. Barely a sound at all. "The war is a lie."
"Sir, you need to stay still?—"
"Moretti. Virelli." His grip tightens. Fingers like iron. "Engineered. All of it." A wet cough rattles through him. Bloodmists my glove. "The drive. Don't let them have it. Not Enzo. Not your father."
He knows who I am.
How the hell does he know who I am?
