Chapter 2 - The Shadows of Harbor Point
Before Grant could fire back another defensive excuse, the sliding automatic doors at the ambulance bay blasted open with a deafening crash, cutting off our argument.
“Trauma alert! Incoming! Clear the corridor!” shouted paramedic Vance, pushing his way through the doors while desperately compressing a bloody gauze pad against a massive shoulder wound.
Behind him rolled a gurney carrying a mountain of a man dressed in an expensive, blood-soaked Italian wool suit. His face was carved from granite, pale from massive blood loss, with silver-streaked hair slicked back from a forehead covered in cold sweat. But it wasn't his size that commanded the room; it was the chilling, absolute authority radiating from his dark eyes.
Even bleeding out on a stretcher, he looked like a king who commanded armies.
“Watch his left lung, he took a slug near the clavicle!” Vance barked as they locked the gurney into trauma bay one.
I abandoned Grant without another glance, sprinting toward the trauma bay. As the lead attending physician on duty, my personal marital drama evaporated the second human life entered my sphere of responsibility.
“Status!” I commanded, ripping open a sterile supply pack.
“Male, approximately late fifties, sustained two gunshot wounds in a downtown warehouse shootout,” Vance reported rapidly. “Blood pressure is tanking at 80 over 50, pulse is 125 and thready. He’s losing consciousness fast.”
We swarmed the bed like a well-oiled machine. Nurses cut away the ruined Italian suit jacket, revealing a massive chest covered in jagged surgical scars and dark, traditional tattoos that whispered of an underground world far more dangerous than anything Harbor Point Urgent Care usually saw on a Thursday night.
As I placed my stethoscope against his chest to check breath sounds, the wounded man’s heavy eyelids fluttered open. His dark eyes locked onto mine with terrifying clarity. He didn't flinch from the pain. He didn't cry out. He simply studied my face with predatory precision.
“Doctor,” he rasped, his voice a gravelly, deep rumble that carried immense weight. “Save the lecture... just keep me breathing long enough to settle a score.”
“Save your breath,” I ordered, sliding a chest tube tray across the metal cart. “You’ve got a hemothorax. If I don't decompress this chest right now, you won't live long enough to settle anything.”
He let out a grim, humorless chuckle that turned into a wet cough. “I like you, Doc. Reminds me of... family.”
While Nora prepped the lidocaine and I prepped my scalpel, I caught movement in the reflection of the glass observation window. Grant had followed me from the OB staging area, hovering anxiously outside the trauma bay doors with Brianna leaning heavily against his arm. He looked unsettled, his eyes darting nervously toward the blood-soaked man on my table as if he recognized something—or someone—in that room.
My hands moved steadily, making the precise incision between the ribs to relieve the pressure building in the patient's chest cavity. A gush of dark blood and air hissed through the valve, and the man’s oxygen saturation instantly climbed back into the safe nineties.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Good hands,” he whispered, his grip suddenly shooting out and clamping around my wrist with iron strength, despite his massive blood loss. “You have... the Mercer eyes. Or rather... you’re tied to the man who thinks he owns the docks.”
I froze, my scalpel hovering inches from the tray. “What did you say?”
The mafia boss—who I now realized was Viktor Vance, the notorious head of the eastern seaboard syndicate that police intelligence had been hunting for a decade—smiled weakly, blood staining his teeth.
“Grant Mercer,” Viktor muttered softly, loud enough for the nurses around the bed to hear. “Your loyal, upright, law-abiding husband. Tell me, Doctor... has he told you whose money built his architectural firm? Or whose unborn child his precious mistress is actually carrying?”
The trauma bay went dead silent. Even the rhythmic beeping of the cardiac monitor seemed to slow down.
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Outside the glass partition, Grant’s face turned the color of wet cement. He dropped Brianna’s arm, his eyes wide with stark, unadulterated terror as he mouthed a frantic warning through the glass: “Claire, don't listen to him! He’s delirious! He’s a criminal!”
Viktor let out a raspy, triumphant laugh that rattled his damaged lung. “Criminal? Maybe. But I pay my debts. And I know for a fact that the child inside that blonde gold-digger out there... belongs to my youngest son, Leo. Not Grant.”
