Chapter 15

"Hold her still," Elias muttered, his voice raspy and cracked as he shifted violently against the sweat-drenched sheets of the safe house cot.

Maeve didn't flinch, her fingers locked securely around the shivering, terrified woman pinned to the chair in the corner of the dimly lit room. "She saw too much, boss. You know the protocol. We can't just let her waltz back into St. Jude's and start pointing fingers at the board."

Raphael scrambled across the rough wooden floorboards, his knuckles still throbbing from the parking garage scuffle, throwing his body between Maeve and Elise. "No! Leave her out of this. She didn't mean to run the sample, she was just checking my charts!"

"Your charts are the least of our problems right now, Doctor," Maeve snapped, her eyes narrowing as she flicked a glance toward Elias, who was currently clutching his abdomen with a groan of pure agony. "Look at him. The infection is tracking along the deep fascial planes. If he goes septic tonight, we all die in this room anyway, starting with your little hospital friend."

Elise looked up at Raphael, tears cutting clean tracks through the dust and grime on her pale cheeks, her voice trembling violently. "Raphael... what is happening? Who are these monsters? Why are you protecting a man who looks like he just crawled out of a mass grave?"

"I'm not a monster, Ms. Ross," Elias rasped, his eyes burning with an intense, feverish heat as he forced himself up onto one elbow, his hospital gown soaked entirely through with gray, foul-smelling sweat. "I'm just a man who picked the wrong family to be born into."

"Shut your mouth, Elias, you're only making the fever spike faster," Raphael ordered, dropping to his knees beside the makeshift medical cot and pressing the back of his hand against Elias's burning forehead. The skin felt like a cast-iron skillet fresh off a burner. "His core temperature is pushing one hundred and four. If we don't bring this down immediately, he's going into multi-organ failure."

"Let him burn," Maeve muttered, though she reluctantly loosened her grip on Elise’s arm, shoving her roughly into the adjacent chair. "Maybe if he dies, we can all go back to living normal lives instead of dodging snipers in industrial parks."

"If he dies, your syndicate brothers won't stop until every single person who ever breathed the same air as him is buried in an unmarked shallow grave," Raphael shot back, his voice dropping into that terrifying, cold register that usually made surgical residents weep in the trauma bays. "Maeve, get me the ice from the cooler in the corner, and strip these blankets off him right now. We need active surface cooling before his brain starts cooking."

Elias caught Raphael’s wrist as the doctor reached for the saline drip line, his fingers digging in with a surprising, desperate strength. "Don't waste the ice on me, Raphael. Save it for the drinks... we're going to need them when Julian gets here."

Raphael frowned, gently prying Elias's fingers loose while feeling the erratic, bounding pulse hammering against his fingertips. "Julian? Who the hell is Julian? Your attending surgeon?"

"My brother," Elias whispered, his eyelids fluttering shut as a fresh shiver wracked his battered frame, his teeth chattering against each other with a sickening click. "My younger, much more ambitious brother. The one who sent the woman with the ceramic blade into VIP Room 402."

Elise gasped from her corner, her hands flying to cover her mouth again. "A hitman? In the hospital? Raphael, you operated on a syndicate boss?"

"Quiet, Elise," Raphael hissed without turning around, expertly sliding a large-bore IV needle into the collapsed vein of Elias’s forearm and taping it down with a strip of dirty adhesive tape. "Elias, focus on my voice. Why did Julian want you dead? You're the head of the operation."

"I was the head," Elias corrected, coughing weakly as a thin line of pink-tinged sputum leaked from the corner of his cracked lips. "That's why he had to clear the board. I wanted out. I wanted to liquidate the drug routes, close the docks, and turn the capital assets into legitimate real estate holdings. Julian likes the blood too much. He thinks the violence is the point, not the profit."

"You're a sentimental fool, Elias," Maeve said, slamming a bag of melted ice onto the wooden floor beside the bed before pacing restlessly toward the cracked window that looked out over the decaying industrial alleyway. "And your sentimentality is going to get a bullet through my skull before the week is out."

"He's not a fool, he's septic," Raphael corrected coldly, packing the ice bags around Elias's groin and armpits to drop his rapidly climbing internal temperature. "Hold his shoulders down, Maeve. He's going to start thrashing when the shivering sets in."

Elias suddenly thrashed violently against the mattress, his eyes snapping wide open, completely dilated and staring straight through Raphael with a terrifying, hallucinatory intensity. "Julian! Get away from the ledger! The accounts are clean, I moved them to the offshore trust before you even knew the bank existed!"

"Elias, look at me," Raphael commanded, pressing his palms firmly against the man's burning chest, feeling the frantic, galloping rhythm of a heart begging to give out. "You're in the safe house. Julian isn't here. You're safe."

"He's at the docks," Elias muttered, his voice dropping into a broken, childlike plea that chilled Raphael straight to the marrow. "He's always at the docks, waiting in the dark with a knife. Don't let him take the ledger, Raphael. It's all we have left to buy our way out."

"What is he talking about?" Elise demanded, leaning forward in her chair, the fear in her eyes momentarily eclipsed by an investigative reporter's cold curiosity. "What ledger? Raphael, what have you gotten yourself mixed up in?"

"I said shut up, reporter," Maeve growled, resting the heavy butt of a suppressed 9mm pistol against her thigh as she glared across the room. "One more word out of you and I tape your mouth shut. The doctor is busy keeping your former patient from flatlining on my floor."

Raphael ignored them both, his eyes locked entirely on the monitor screen of the portable pulse oximeter he had managed to smuggle out of St. Jude's in his lab coat pocket. The oxygen saturation was dropping steadily: ninety-one percent... eighty-eight... eighty-five.

"Damn it," Raphael cursed, grabbing the manual bag-valve mask from his trauma kit and slamming the rubber cup over Elias’s face, squeezing rhythmically to force oxygen into the congested, failing lungs. "Breathe, you stubborn bastard. I didn't cut you open and stitch your aorta back together just to watch you die of a hospital-acquired pneumonia in a glorified garage."

Elias blinked heavily beneath the plastic mask, a weak, cynical ghost of a smile touching the corners of his pale, chapped lips. "You... really care, don't you, Doctor?"

"I care about my patient survival statistics," Raphael lied smoothly, though his hands were shaking as he adjusted the oxygen flow rate up to maximum. "And right now, your survival rate is looking dangerously close to zero."

"Liar," Elias whispered, his hand coming up to weakly wrap around Raphael’s wrist, his thumb brushing lightly over the frantic pulse point at the base of the surgeon's palm. "You threw away your entire career the second you helped me hide that blood sample in VIP 402. You're just as dirty as the rest of us now."

"I am a doctor," Raphael snapped back, though he didn't pull his hand away, the heat of Elias's skin burning right through his sterile surgical gloves. "I save lives. That is all I have ever done."

"No," Elias murmured, his eyes finally growing heavy as the ice packs began to drag his terrifying fever down from the redline. "You stopped saving lives a long time ago, Raphael. Tonight... you started saving me."

Maeve let out a harsh, dry laugh from the window, tapping the glass with her fingernail as a pair of headlights swept across the rusted corrugated iron of the opposite warehouse. "Save the romance for the recovery ward, boys. We've got company."

Raphael’s head snapped toward the window, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. "What do you mean, company? Who's out there?"

"Not Julian," Maeve said, her voice dropping into a flat, deadly calm as she clicked off the safety of her firearm and raised it toward the heavy wooden entrance door. "It's Corbett's clean-up crew from St. Jude's. They tracked your hospital parking sticker straight to this zip code."