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I just never expected to use those skills on a man I loved, then hated, then got really confused about. The fury hones my hands, and my hands find the bullet. It comes out, and I sew up the artery. I flush and pack and close. Somewhere in the middle, his blood pressure drops, so I run two units into him through a line I placed by feel, and it holds. The number climbs back to something I’ll accept, and the work goes on.

When I finally step back, gloves red past the wrist, he’s alive. Breathing on his own, deep under the sedation Nick’s kit provided. I put a hand flat on the steel table beside him, just for a second.

“Doc, you good?” Enzo asks.

Then I straighten. “Yeah. I’m good. Keep both eyes on him. He changes color, his breathing changes⁠—”

“He so much as twitches, and I’m calling you.”

“Perfect.” There’s a second patient in the next room, and she raised the man I just saved. I strip off the gloves, pop on new ones, and head over.

On my way past, I catch Nick’s face gone unguarded over his don. Fifty years of something the man will never say aloud, cracked open by a bad night and a steel table.

I look away. Some grief is private, even when privacy is not an option.

Diana is worse than she let on, not that I’m surprised. Lacerations up one arm, a scalp gash that bled theatrically and looks worse than it is, and a hip that was fragile before the crash and is now, I’m fairly sure, broken.

“Let’s get you patched up.” I clean the wounds as best I can—cleanliness was not the priority of whoever stocked this safe house. I dose her, hoping that will help with the pain. I have to save the good painkillers for Lupo. But I don’t tell her that. “I will get you to a real hospital for the hip the moment the world is safe enough for travel. I promise.”

She takes my hand in her uninjured one and says something in Italian I don’t need translated. The word for what’s in her face is the same in every language. “You came back,” she says, in English, so I can’t pretend I misheard. “With the airport ahead of you and my son bleeding behind you, you turned around. You think I did not see, from the ditch? I saw.”

“Somebody had to keep him alive,” I say.

“It did not have to be you. But it was.”

“I’m still furious with him.”

“Good.” She pats my hand, satisfied, and closes her eyes. “Furious is fine. A woman can build a life on furious. It is only indifference that kills a marriage.”

“Diana—”

“I have watched you since you arrived. You are many things, but indifferent is not one of them.” A breath, fading toward the sedation. “Stay furious. Just… stay.” She yawns as her eyes close, and her head shifts back into the pillow.

I don’t answer that. There are no answers to that.

I go and scrub the blood off in the farmhouse sink, watching it swirl pink down the drain, and I let myself, for exactly the length of the washing, not be anyone’s doctor.

Ten seconds of peace. That’s all I ask.

I’m just a woman in a warehouse at four in the morning who ran the wrong way and can’t fully explain to herself why. Diana’s right. I had a clear path to the airport. When the shooting stopped, I could have taken any of the working cars and made my way to the airport, taken the flight home, and that would be that.

No more bullets flying at my head. No more jealous bitches, sending those bullets after me. None of the craziness of Lupo’s life would follow me there. I have no doubt he wouldn’t have let it happen.

If he lived without my help, that is.

But I stayed. I could tell myself it’s because I’m a doctor first and a person second. Or that I did it without thinking, because my training kicked in. Or some other excuse.

It’d be just another lie.

The moment Lupo pulled me down and threw himself on top of me, something cracked open deep inside my heart. It wasn’t a thought for him—it was instinct. Protecting me is his first instinct.

Which is why he kept me from knowing anything that’s been going on.

It wasn’t some self-serving deceit, and it wasn’t because he was hiding the truth so he could keep the counterfeit ring going. That’s not who he is.

He’s a complicated man who’s been working to end something even more complicated than himself.

And when he got out of the car, he was already bleeding out because he took a bullet for me. I staggered out of the car when the shooting stopped because I had to help him. It wasn’t a thought—I saw that we were dying, and I had to help us.