THE MAFIA BOSS WAS DYING OF A MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS—UNTIL HIS NEW NURSE KNOCKED THE SYRINGE FROM HIS FIANCÉE’S HAND AND EXPOSED A SICKENING SECRET

The shotgun barrel was four feet from my face.

The heat radiating from the warm metal carried the smell of burnt gunpowder directly into my nostrils. My breath caught in my throat, but I forced my chin up. If you show fear to a predator, you die. That was true for violent psych patients in the emergency room, and it was true for mafia capos with sawed-off twelve-gauges.

“Look at my hands, Marco,” I said, holding both palms up, completely empty. The heavy medical shears were still tucked securely into my belt loop. “If I wanted your brother dead, I didn't need a hit team. All I had to do was stand in the corner and let his fiancée inject him with fifty units of Humalog. He would have had a seizure, choked on his own tongue, and died while you were eating lunch.”

“She’s spinning you, Marco!” Vanessa cried out from the floor, scrambling to her knees. “She knows how to talk! She’s an operative! The Valentis paid Dr. Sterling, and Sterling hired her! Why else would she show up out of nowhere just when Luca started getting sick?”

“I showed up because your regular nurse had her car firebombed in Lincoln Park three days ago!” I barked back, locking eyes with Luca. “Ask Dante! Who called the registry agency? Who requested an emergency replacement with Level-1 trauma certification?”

Luca lowered his Colt slightly. His gaze swept from Marco’s furious face down to Vanessa, whose eyes were darting toward the open solarium door at the far end of the hallway.

“Dante called the agency,” Luca said, his voice cold as a winter tomb. “Nobody else had the authority.”

Marco didn’t lower the shotgun. “She could have intercepted the call, Luca. You’re not thinking straight—you were half-dead twenty minutes ago!”

“I am thinking clearer than I have in three months,” Luca replied. He took three deliberate, steady steps toward his brother, placing the palm of his left hand against the barrel of the shotgun and pushing it down toward the floor. “Lower the weapon, Marco.”

Marco’s jaw muscles flexed, but he obeyed, letting the shotgun rest against his thigh.

“Search the dead men,” Luca commanded Dante. “Take off their masks. I want to see whose faces are decorating my hallway.”

Dante moved quickly. He knelt by the first body, grabbed the edge of the tactical balaclava, and ripped it off with a sickening squelch of blood and torn fabric.

The face underneath was young, barely thirty, with a jagged scar across the left eyebrow and a tattoo of a coiled viper on his neck.

“Joey 'The Snake' Morello,” Dante murmured, looking up with grim eyes. “West Side crew.”

Marco went utterly rigid.

The room dropped into another terrifying silence.

The West Side crew didn't belong to the rival Valenti family. The West Side crew belonged to Marco Moretti.

“Marco,” Luca said softly. The name sounded like an execution sentence.

“Luca, I swear to God—” Marco stammered, his bravado instantly evaporating. His grip on the shotgun slipped slightly. “Morello was running security on the docks! I didn't authorize this! I haven't spoken to him in two weeks!”

“He was using your private communication frequency, brother,” Luca said, his eyes drilling into Marco’s skull. “The radio recording you just played for us? That wasn't a Valenti encrypted channel. That’s the tactical band we set up for our private logistics team last August.”

Marco’s eyes dilated in sheer panic. “I was set up! Someone gave him the codes! Vanessa—!”

*Crack.*

A single, suppressed gunshot echoed from the glass solarium behind us.

The heavy bullet tore through the air, missing Luca by less than three inches, and smashed directly through the center of Marco’s chest plate. The kinetic force lifted the younger brother off his feet, slamming him hard against the shattered mahogany table.

“Sniper!” Dante bellowed, lunging forward to tackle Luca to the carpet.

Glass showered down from the solarium ceiling as a second high-caliber round pulverized the potted exotic palms.

“Marco!” Luca yelled, struggling against Dante’s grip.

Through the smoke and the falling shards of glass, I didn't duck.

I saw Marco lying on his back, gasping like a fish pulled from the water, pink froth bubbling from his lips—a tension pneumothorax. The round had penetrated the edge of his Kevlar vest, crushing two ribs and puncturing his right lung. In less than three minutes, the air leaking into his thoracic cavity would collapse his heart.

I scrambled on my knees through the broken glass, ignoring the sharp bites of crystal cutting through my denim scrubs.

“Emma, stay down!” Luca roared from behind a marble pillar.

“He has two minutes before his heart stops!” I yelled back, sliding to a stop beside Marco’s convulsing body.

I grabbed my heavy trauma shears, sliced his shirt open from collar to waist, and exposed the entry wound. The skin was swelling rapidly, turning a dark, bruised violet. His trachea was deviating to the left—a classic, lethal indicator.

“Needle decompression,” I muttered to myself.

I ripped open my medical kit, grabbed a fourteen-gauge, three-inch angiocatheter, and found the second intercostal space on the right side of his chest, mid-clavicular line.

Marco’s eyes were bulging, staring at me in terrified pleading.

“Hold him down!” I shouted.

Dante crawled forward, pinning Marco’s shoulders.

I drove the long needle straight down into Marco’s chest wall.

A sharp, violent hiss of trapped air and dark blood sprayed from the catheter hub, hitting my face and scrubs. Instantly, the pressure released. Marco’s chest expanded, and he drew in a violent, rattling breath of air, the blue tint on his lips receding back to pale gray.

“He’s alive,” I panted, wiping the blood from my forehead with the back of my gloved hand. “For now. But he needs a trauma surgeon within the hour, or he’ll bleed out internally.”

From the shadows of the solarium, a door clicked.

Vanessa was gone.