CHAPTER 11: THE UNDERGROUND CLINIC
1282 Words
Valentina
The ugly building was a clinic.
A real one.
Not a folding table, a bottle of whiskey, and a man named Bruno holding pliers. There were exam rooms, a small lab, two operating bays, stocked cabinets, and an ancient coffee machine that sounded like it was dying every time someone touched it.
The place smelled like bleach, blood, and burnt coffee.
A whiteboard beside the desk listed six patients by first name only. Knife wound. Broken hand. Infection. Fever. One line simply said REMOVE BULLET WHEN SOBER.
I read it twice.
Apparently standards were flexible underground.
The men with the stretcher pushed through the doors.
The patient was young. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Thin face. Dark curls stuck to his forehead. His shirt was soaked red along one side, and his hands kept trying to press the wound even though one of them shook too badly to help.
"What happened?" I asked.
The man beside the stretcher said, "Truck yard."
"How was he hurt?"
He glanced at Cillian.
The boy answered before anyone else could.
"Gun."
His voice barely carried.
Of course.
I pulled on gloves.
"What's your name?"
"Thomas."
"Thomas what?"
His eyes went to Cillian.
"Murphy," Cillian said.
Thomas looked relieved that someone had answered for him.
I hated that.
"Thomas, look at me."
His eyes found mine and slipped away again.
"I'm Valentina. I'm going to look at your side. Try not to move."
"Am I—"
He stopped to breathe.
"Am I dying?"
"I don't know yet. Let me check."
It was not the comforting answer people liked on television. It was the honest one.
His fingers closed around my wrist.
A cheap braided bracelet circled his own. Blue thread, plastic beads, one white letter missing from whatever name it had once spelled.
"Don't cut this," he said.
"I won't."
"My sister made it."
"Okay. Keep your hand there."
I guided his palm away from the wound and onto his chest.
"Where's your mother?"
His face changed.
That was answer enough.
I looked over my shoulder.
"Someone call her."
Nobody moved.
"Now."
Cillian took out his phone.
"She thinks he works at a warehouse," Ronan said.
"Then tell her there was an accident."
My voice sounded different here. Steadier. The room made sense in a way the estate did not.
Cillian walked away with the phone at his ear.
Good.
I cut Thomas's shirt away from the wound. The bullet had passed through the soft tissue near his side. A lot of blood, but his abdomen was not rigid and his breathing stayed even.
Lucky.
Very lucky.
"Fluids," I said to the nurse hovering near the cabinet. "Blood work. Pain medication when his pressure comes up. I need the ultrasound."
She moved, then stopped. "Dr. Kavanaugh usually—"
"Is he here?"
"No."
"Then get the ultrasound."
She looked at Ronan.
He nodded once.
That irritated me, but there was no time to argue about it.
Thomas pulled at my sleeve.
"Please don't let me die."
The words came out wet and young.
I leaned closer so he would not have to search for my face.
"I'm working on it. Stay still for me."
He nodded too fast and winced.
Cillian returned.
"His mother is coming."
"How long?"
"Twenty minutes."
I pointed toward the sink.
"Wash your hands."
He looked at me.
"I need another pair of hands. You're standing there."
For a second, I expected him to refuse because everyone in the room was watching.
He went to the sink.
Ronan said nothing.
Cillian came to the table and pressed gauze where I showed him.
"Here. Not so hard."
He eased the pressure.
His hands were larger than mine. Steady. The same hands that had pinned me against a concrete pillar and held me there while he got hard against my ass.
I watched his fingers press the gauze and felt my pulse jump in places that had nothing to do with medicine.
Thomas stared at him.
"Are you... are you the Reaper?"
Cillian kept his eyes on the gauze.
"Who told you that?"
Thomas swallowed. "People."
"People talk."
"Did you get the man who shot me?"
Cillian's hand did not move.
"Not yet."
Thomas closed his eyes.
The answer seemed to calm him.
I decided not to examine what that said about any of us.
The scan showed no internal bleeding. The bullet had been kind, which was more than I could say for the people involved.
We cleaned and closed the wounds. Thomas cursed when the local anaesthetic went in, then apologized to me, his mother, and possibly God.
"Save your breath," I told him. "You'll need it when your mother gets here."
That earned the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth.
When we finished, the nurse moved him into recovery.
Cillian's phone rang. He answered, listened, and carried it to Thomas.
"Your mother."
Thomas took it with both hands.
A woman's frightened voice came through the speaker. He started crying without making a sound.
I turned to the chart. Cillian looked toward the door.
Neither of us mentioned it.
After the call, I took off my gloves.
"Why was he at the truck yard?"
Cillian looked through the recovery-room glass.
"His father owed money."
"So you sent the son?"
"Declan did."
"And you let him."
His face changed. Not much. Enough.
I picked up the chart.
"How much?"
"Forty thousand," Ronan said.
I stared at him.
"He's seventeen."
"Eighteen last month," Ronan said.
As though that improved anything.
I wrote the antibiotic schedule harder than necessary.
Thomas would need follow-up, rest, and a family that did not use him to settle accounts. I could only arrange two of those things.
Cillian took the chart from me.
"What are you doing?"
He wrote something at the bottom and signed it.
Then he gave it to Ronan.
"Clear the Murphy account."
Ronan looked at him. "All of it?"
"Yes."
"Declan approved that?"
"No."
Ronan's eyes moved briefly to me, then back to Cillian.
"I'll handle it."
He left before anyone could change their mind.
I looked at Cillian.
"Why?"
He rubbed his thumb across a smear of blood on his palm.
"He shouldn't have been there."
He kept rubbing the blood across his thumb as if he hadn't noticed it.
"There are probably others."
"There are."
"And?"
His gaze went to the recovery room.
"I can't clear every debt tonight."
"You could stop using children."
His eyes came back to mine.
"I don't run all of it."
"But you run enough."
He did not answer.
Thomas's mother arrived twenty minutes later in a winter coat thrown over pink pyjamas. She pushed past two guards, shoved Ronan's arm away when he tried to slow her, and ran into recovery.
Thomas called her Ma in the tiny voice people used only when they were hurt badly enough to forget they wanted to look grown.
She held his face and cursed everyone in the building.
I liked her immediately.
Cillian stood outside the glass while she cried over her son. He had not left.
I moved beside him.
"You knew I'd help."
"Yes."
I waited for the rest.
There wasn't one.
"Is that why you brought me down here?"
He looked through the glass.
"Partly."
"What's the other part?"
His hand went to the edge of the counter.
At first I thought he was avoiding the question.
Then his fingers tightened until the knuckles went white.
"Cillian?"
He blinked slowly.
The colour had drained from his face.
I stepped closer.
"Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"No, you're not."
His knee buckled.
Ronan moved from the doorway at the same time I did.
Cillian never reached the chair.
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