Chapter 4 - The Awakenings
The room was instantly flooded with blue scrubs.
Two ICU nurses and Dr. Bailey, the senior attending, burst through the glass doors, their sneakers squeaking frantically against the tile.
"Get him back down!" Bailey shouted, reaching for the bag-valve mask. "He pulled the tube! Push five of Versed! Suction that airway!"
Nora was frozen, pinned by Adrian’s gaze even as three people piled on top of him to restrain his limbs. His grip on her scrub top didn't release until Bailey jammed the sedative into the IV line. Even as his amber eyes began to roll back into his head, his fingers clawed at her coat, his bloody lips trying to form the word again.
Nora.
Then the drugs hit his brainstem. His body went limp. His head fell back onto the red-stained pillow.
"Whitfield, move!" Bailey barked, shoving Nora aside to drop a fresh laryngoscope into Adrian’s throat. "Suction! I need a size eight cuffed tube! Bag him! Now!"
Nora stepped backward until her hips hit the supply counter. Her chest was heaving. Her wrist bore the red, mottled imprint of his fingers. Through the clear plastic window, she saw Marcus standing in the corridor, his face grim, watching her through the chaos.
He had asked for his daughter.
Not if he had a child. Not what she had done.
Where is my daughter?
He already knew. Marcus hadn't told him, but Adrian had discovered it on his own before the bullets found him at the docks. That was why he had been in Washington. He hadn't come for the terminal leases. He had come for Lily.
Ten minutes later, the bay was stabilized. Adrian was back on mechanical ventilation, double-restrained to the bed rails with soft cloth cuffs, and his sedation had been deepened to a surgical coma.
Dr. Bailey stripped off his gloves and tossed them into the biohazard bin, wiping sweat from his forehead. He turned to Nora, his expression suspicious.
"What happened in here, Nora? The guy was on forty mikes of fentanyl. He shouldn't have been able to blink, let alone extubate himself."
"He... he had an adverse emergence reaction," Nora lied, her voice hollow. "His metabolic clearance must be higher than average. He fought the tube before I could push the secondary paralytic."
Bailey narrowed his eyes, looking at the torn collar of her scrub top. "He grabbed you. Did he say something to you?"
"Nothing coherent," Nora said, her fingers curling into fists inside her pockets. "Just delirium."
"Well, whoever he is, he's a magnet for trouble," Bailey said, jerking his chin toward the hallway. "The hospital administrator just called down. The governor’s security detail is on line one. We’re being told to provide absolute privacy and that private security will control the floor perimeter. I want you to go home, Whitfield. You did forty hours between your rotation and that emergency repair. You look like a corpse."
"I need to finish my shift," Nora said instinctively.
"That's an order, Nora," Bailey replied firmly. "Go home. Kiss your kid. Come back tomorrow night."
Nora didn't argue a second time. She walked out of Bay Four, avoiding Marcus’s eyes as she slipped down the service stairwell instead of taking the main elevators.
She ran through the basement corridors, burst into the rain-slicked morning air of Seattle, and climbed into her battered Subaru. Her hands were shaking so violently that it took her three attempts to insert the key into the ignition.
The engine turned over with a rough cough.
May you like
She backed out of the physicians' parking lot, her wipers slapping furiously against the downpour. As she turned onto Mercer Street, she glanced in her rearview mirror.
Two blocks behind her, a black Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows and out-of-state plates pulled out from the curb, matching her speed through the morning traffic.
