Chapter 1: The Price of Blood
Alyssa
The sickening scent of antiseptic mingles with the iron smell of blood. It's the incense of my daily life, the murmured prayer against death that I breathe every night in this Houston emergency room. But tonight, the prayer is a continuous scream. Sirens howl, swinging doors crash open in a metallic clamor, and the hallway disgorges its latest batch of misery.
When they burst in, time freezes.
It's not the man on the gurney, his chest torn apart by bullet wounds, that chills my blood. It's the escort.
Four men. Dressed in black. Their eyes are as empty and dead as polished stones. They radiate an aura of violence so pure it drowns out everything else. The air grows thick, hard to breathe.
— We're taking trauma room one, now!
My own voice seems to come from far away. My hands, acting on their own, press down on the worst wound to compress, to contain the life that's fleeing.
One of the men, the tallest, meets my gaze. His dark eyes absorb the light. He says nothing. He doesn't need to. The message is as clear as a blade against my throat: He dies, you die.
Beneath my fingers, the skin is warm, muscular. A sinuous tattoo, a red shadow devouring an eagle, snakes up his neck. The cartel. It can only be that.
For twenty minutes, it's the controlled chaos of trauma. Intubation, transfusion, monitoring. I'm a general, my mind a sharp instrument filtering out fear. I feel the weight of the guards' stares on my neck, a target drawn between my shoulder blades.
Suddenly, the monitor's beep goes erratic. Ventricular tachycardia.
— Defibrillator!
The electric shock jolts the inert body. Nothing.
— Two hundred joules!
A second shock. The body arches, falls back. The line on the screen stays desperately flat. The shrill beep of asystole tears through the room.
No.
Without thinking, driven by an instinct stronger than anything, I leap onto the table, straddle the patient, and begin chest compressions. My arms, already aching, sink with a savage force into his chest.
— Come on, you bastard, come on!
That's when the trauma room doors burst open.
He enters.
The air thins, sucked away by his presence. He is tall, built from pure power, dressed in a pearl-gray suit that clashes with the butchery scene. His face is sharply beautiful, angular. But his eyes… Eyes of an absolute black that sweep the room and land on the man's body.
Silence falls, heavier than a gunshot.
Me, suspended above the corpse, my hands covered in his blood, I look up at the intruder.
His gaze moves from the body to me. There is no anger. No grief. Nothing. Just a cold, calculating assessment. Like judging a horse.
He takes a step. Then another. The click of his shoes on the tile is the only sound.
— You stopped fighting for him, Doctor?
His voice is a rough velvet that fills the room and freezes my blood. I climb off the table, legs wobbling.
— I… I couldn't save him. He went into cardiac arrest. The damage was too extensive.
He stops so close I can smell his aftershave, a mix of tobacco and sandalwood. His gaze travels over my face, my disheveled hair, my gown stained with his man's blood.
— You have fury in your eyes.
He raises a hand and, before I can recoil, he brushes a splash of blood from my cheek with his fingertips. The touch is burning, intimate, violating.
— It's beautiful.
Fear explodes into blinding anger. My hand slaps his away.
— Don't touch me.
The slap echoes. The guards flinch, hands moving toward their weapons. Him, not a flicker. A slow, dangerous smile stretches his lips.
— And courage. Or madness.
He turns to the body.
— Take him away.
Then his gaze returns to me, latches on, locks.
— And take her.
The world tilts.
— No!
My scream is smothered by a giant hand over my mouth. I struggle. I fight, I bite, I scratch. My elbows, my knees, everything becomes a weapon. I hear a grunt when my heel crushes a foot.
I beg. The muffled sounds behind the hand are prayers, threats.
But they are too strong. Too many. A burning sting sinks into my neck. A toxic cold spreads through my veins.
The last thing I see, before darkness swallows me, is his face. He looks at me with the intensity of a collector who has just found his absolute masterpiece.
A trophy. His prize.
And in his black eyes, I read the truth, absolute and terrifying.
He never intended to give me back.
