Chapter 2 - Trauma Room 4 and the Unwanted Arrival
Bleeding beneath the sterile white sheets of Trauma Room 4, I watched the heavy double doors swing open with a hiss, announcing the arrival of the man who had broken my heart. My name is Elena Vera, and the man standing at the threshold was Mateo Vera—the most feared mafia boss on the Greyport waterfront. He was a man whom city judges greeted politely by name and whom armed soldiers obeyed before he even finished speaking. Yet, in that sterile hospital doorway, he stopped dead in his tracks like a stranger who had taken a wrong turn in the dark.
I lay trapped on the metal gurney, my skull aching and my lungs burning with the taste of copper and glass. Around me, the emergency medical team worked in a frantic, terrifying blur. Shears chewed through the heavy wool of my dark green winter coat. A nurse slapped defibrillator pads onto my cold, clammy skin. ""Pressure is seventy over forty and sliding!"" someone shouted over the shrill alarms. ""Tachycardia at one-thirty! Hang two units of uncrossed O-neg right now!"" Then Mateo stepped into the light. I didn't even have to turn my head to know he was there; I recognized the heavy, deliberate cadence of his footsteps before the scent of his charcoal cashmere coat reached my bed.
May you like
Beside him walked Vivienne Cross. She wore a spotless camel-hair coat that had never seen a drop of rain, clutching a cream leather handbag against her ribs like an expensive shield. Her sweet, powdery perfume cut violently through the reek of my drying blood. I had spent eight agonizing months preparing myself for the day I would see them together again, thinking betrayal would hurt most across a breakfast table. I was wrong. It hurt most when the man who had sworn an oath before God to protect me arrived while I was dying—and allowed another woman to decide whether my life was worth staying for.
Mateo stared at the blood running from my split temple down to my jaw. His hands, usually resting loosely in his pockets with the terrifying confidence of an armed kingpin, hung completely limp at his sides. He looked at me with the stunned, cold detachment of a landlord discovering an old property damaged by fire. Vivienne’s manicured fingers tightened hard around his wool sleeve. ""Mateo,"" she whispered, her voice carrying clearly over the hiss of the oxygen line. ""We should go. She left the estate eight months ago. She filed the papers. This is not our problem."" For half a second, Mateo actually shifted his weight toward the hallway, ready to obey the mistress he had replaced me with.
