Chapter One
Sloane
You can’t tell someone not to die just because it’s Christmas Eve. I should know. I’ve tried twice already and it hasn’t worked either time. St. Peter’s has been non-stop since I started my shift thirty-six hours ago, and it doesn’t look like things are going to quiet down any time soon.
Zeth is going to kill me. I was supposed to be home nearly twelve hours ago, but the gunshot wound, alcohol poisoning and bar fight victims have kept on rolling in. Now, Mikey the intern and I are waiting on the tarmac outside the hospital for the second road traffic accident of the night and my body is humming. It’s close to midnight. I should be exhausted, but the adrenalin that’s helped me act fast and think quick on the trauma floor has me wired.
“You think it’ll stop snowing soon?” Mikey asks. “I’m supposed to drive out to Snoqualmie Pass after this. The roads are gonna be closed at this rate.”
“Hate to break it to you, buddy, but the roads are already closed.” I slap Mikey on the back, giving him my best consolatory look. I heard them read out the list of closures on the radio at the nurses’ station earlier in the night, waiting with bated breath to see if the access road up to my own house was still open. Thankfully it is. Unlucky for Mikey, though. He’s shit out of luck.
“Ahhh fuck, man. My whole family are up there already. I’m gonna be eating baked beans on toast for Christmas dinner tomorrow. Alone.”
“Better get used to it. Being a doctor generally means you don’t get Christmas. Or Easter. Or Thanksgiving. Or your birthday. Basically we don’t get anything.”
“Perfect.” Mikey sulks while we wait, the big fat flakes of snow falling silently all around us. It’s like we’re trapped inside a snow globe; everything is so still. That is until I see the flashing lights of the ambulance rig tearing up the road toward us.
“Here we go. Incoming.” I glance over my shoulder just as Oliver Massey runs out of the building behind me, huge clouds of fog billowing on his breath. He’s pulling on a set of rubber gloves, squinting up the road, searching for the ambo.
“Sorry, the kid I was closing up crashed. Took a while to stabilize. What we got?”
“Two patients,” Mikey says. “Woman, early thirties, with potential spinal injury and severe blood loss. Also, one of the firefighters who responded to the call. He was sliding in through the passenger window of the car the other patient was trapped inside of. The streetlight she hit fell down on top of the vehicle. He has a head injury, broken leg and possible internal bleed.
“Ah. Right, well I guess that explains the fire truck then,” Oliver says. Sure enough, there’s a fire truck bringing in the ambulance, full lights and sirens blaring out into the night. The two emergency service vehicles tear into the parking lot, the fire truck pulling up outside the unloading bay, while the ambo brakes right at the door.
Oliver and Mikey rush forward with a gurney while I hurry to talk to the female EMT who’s jumping down from the rig. “There should be another ambulance. Where’s our second patient?”
“On their way. The roads are crazy. We’re lucky we made it here in one piece.”
“Who have you got?”
“Alex Massey, lieutenant over at firehouse sixty-three. He was awake when we loaded him up, but he lost consciousness shortly after. He’s systolic. Blood pressure’s through the floor. We pushed dopamine en route.”
“Alright, we’d better move quickly then. We need to find out what’s going on inside.”
Oliver and Mikey are already rushing the gurney with the injured firefighter into St. Peter’s. Oliver’s face is ashen, white as a sheet. “I’m gonna need you to scrub in on this one, Sloane,” he tells me.
“I can’t, I’m point on trauma tonight. I need to oversee the emergency—”
“Sloane, you’re fucking scrubbing in. I need you. I need you.”
“Olly—”
“It’s my brother, Sloane. It’s my fucking brother.”
******
I get Dr. Tarney to take over trauma for me and I do scrub in. There’s no way Oliver should be operating on his own brother—it goes against every rule the hospital has—but there’s no stopping him. By the time the chief knows Alex Massey is in need of medical attention, he’s already receiving it.
We’re fighting to find the source of Alex’s extensive internal bleeding when the chief storms into the OR, a surgical mask covering her face. “Dr. Massey? Dr. Massey, you need to step away from that patient right now,” she says calmly.
Oliver’s working like a man possessed, though. There’s no way he’s going to do that. “I’m afraid things are a little critical in here right now, Chief. You’ll have to excuse me if I decline.”
“Dr. Massey, I’m already scrubbed. I can take over from you. You need to leave. Now.”
Oliver glances up at me, asking me a silent question—do I have his back? I nod. Some doctors would fall apart in situations like this, but not Olly. He’s galvanized, working methodically. He’s not showing any signs of being emotionally compromised. If he were, I’d be the first person to agree with the chief. As it stands, I say, “He’s got this, Chief. Dr. Massey’s currently stemming an aortic bleed. If he lets go—”
“I can catch it. Oliver. I’m serious. This is not how we work.”
Oliver frowns, still entirely focused on his work. “Are you the best cardiothoracic surgeon in this hospital?” His voice is totally steady.
The chief doesn’t say anything.
“Because the last time I checked, you were the best pediatric surgeon in this hospital and I’d just been promoted to the head of my department. Which just so happens to be cardiothoracics.”
“Oliver.”
“I have this under control, Chief. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to concentrate on not letting my brother’s heart tear itself apart.”
The chief gives me a stern look—I’m still not forgiven for the crazy shit I was caught up in a couple of months ago, and aligning myself with a disobedient Oliver won’t have helped matters. “Fine,” she snaps. “But I’ll be watching every single move you make.” The chief huffs out an exasperated breath and backs out of the room, hitting the exit button with her elbow in order to keep the room sterile.
Oliver looks up at me once she’s gone. “Thank you.”
“Just save him, okay. I’m gonna be working extra shifts in the VD clinic to make up for this.” I must be out of my mind. Don’t rock the boat: that’s what I tell myself every time I step foot through the hospital doors, and what is it I end up doing? Rocking the goddamn boat. Nearly capsizing the goddamn boat.
“Is she up there?” Oliver asks, his eyes darting upward to the observation gallery.
I look up in time to see the chief fling open the door to the glass box above us. The surgical mask is gone, which allows me to see her whole facial expression—how truly furious she is. She glowers at me as she sits down next to…as she sits down next to Zeth.
“Fuck.” I whisper it under my breath. What the hell is he doing here?
“Ahhh shit. Sloane, something’s not right. I thought I’d stemmed the flow, but there’s more blood now. It’s not coming from the heart. We need to find it.”
Zeth is forgotten. The observation gallery may as well not exist as I fix every last ounce of concentration on the problem at hand. Oliver and I keep our heads down as we both work in unison, part of a well-oiled machine, trying to find the source of Alex’s bleeding.
It turns out to be a perforation in his lower intestine. Not a usual cause for so much blood, especially seeping into the chest cavity, but the damage is severe.
We resect a good portion of Alex’s lower bowel, scrambling to save every millimeter we can. Alex is a firefighter. I don’t know him, but I can guarantee he won’t want a colostomy bag.
Hours slip by. We manage to preserve enough bowel to avoid having to instal a stoma right away, but only time will tell on that front. If Alex develops an infection and the tissue doesn’t heal, we may have to revisit that idea.
Oliver is swaying on his feet by the time we close his brother. I’m fine, clear-headed and alert, until we stitch Alex up and let the nurses take over. Exhaustion hits me like a brick wall to the face as soon as my responsibility to my patient is over, though. I feel drunk as Oliver and I strip off our surgical gloves, masks and gowns and throw them in the HAZMAT bins.
Outside the OR, Oliver loses it. His composure abandons him as he slides down the wall and begins to cry. “Oh my god. Olly, he’s gonna be fine. You did a good job. Hey, don’t worry.” I crouch down and wrap my arms around him, holding him to me as his body shakes. I know this meltdown isn’t about fear for Alex’s safety. The guy should be okay, providing nothing awful happens. This is just shock. The pressure of having to keep himself together for so many hours has taken its toll.
“Thank you. Thank you. I wouldn’t have trusted anybody else,” Oliver says, drawing in a deep breath. “Fuck, this is stupid.” He dashes away his tears with the backs of his hands, and then heaves himself to his feet. His face reddens a little when he looks back over my shoulder. “I think I’ve monopolized enough of your time, Romera. Looks like you’re needed elsewhere.”
Zeth is leaning against the wall down the corridor, hands in his pockets, watching us. He looks down at his feet when he sees he’s been spotted.
“Yeah, I swore I’d be home for Christmas day,” I say.
“Then you should go.” Oliver gives me a gentle shove in the back.
I really should, too. Zeth has never once broken a promise he’s made to me. I aim on honoring my promises right back. “If anything happens, you know you can just call me right away,” I tell Oliver.
“I do.”
“Okay. I’ll see you in a couple of days, Ol.” I head off down the corridor, but he calls out to me, stopping me before I reach Zeth.
“Hey, Romera?”
“Yeah?”
He gives me a halfhearted, weak smile. “Merry Christmas, right?”
“Yeah. Merry Christmas, Ol.”
Zeth
She looks like she’s ready to pass the fuck out. I think I’m gonna have to catch her when she collapses against me, face pressed into my chest, but I don’t. She’s just tired and leaning on me. I fold my arms around her and hold her up anyway, because that’s what I’m here for. Always. Being there for her to lean on will be my primary job from now and until the day I die, and boy do I have a serious case of job satisfaction.
“You okay?” I breathe into her hair.
She nods, grunting something inaudible into my leather jacket. I kiss her on the top of her head, smoothing down the strands that have escaped her ponytail.
“I’m taking you home now, angry girl. You got anything to say about that?”
She looks up at me, eyes already drooping, and gives me a lazy smile. “I say thank god for that.”
She falls asleep in the car, forehead pressed up against the cold glass of the passenger window, and I can’t fucking help myself. At every available opportunity, I find myself looking at her out of the corner of my eye. I need to make sure this miraculous woman is real.
I saw it the first time at Julio’s compound when Carnie brought Alexis in and laid her out on the table. Sloane was a force of nature, unstoppable and single-minded as she worked over her sister’s broken body. She’d saved Alexis’s life when she would have died otherwise, no two ways about it. Watching her then had taken my breath away. The same thing happened tonight, watching her work over the guy on the table in that operating room. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t stop and she did not once give up. Not even when the chief of medicine, sitting next to me, had started swearing like a marine when the guy had coded not once but twice.
My angry girl is a fucking hero.
The ugly ass Hummer Rebel left behind with us in Seattle struggles to make it up the narrow, winding road to our house as we leave the city. Snow coats everything—the road, the trees, the mountains in the distance. The whole world is white under the headlights of the car as I drive us back to the warmth of home.
She’s still sleeping when I pull up outside. I don’t have the heart to wake her, so I take off my jacket and put it over her as I lift her out of the car and carry her carefully inside.
The fire’s gone out, but Ernie’s still coiled up in a ball in front of the embers. He lifts his head when we come inside, but he doesn’t bark. Terrible fucking guard dog he’d make. I think we’ve accepted the fact that Ernie’s more likely to studiously ignore an intruder than attack them.
I carry Sloane past the long-forgotten arrangements I’d made to surprise her when she came home, straight up the stairs and into the bedroom. I strip her of her clothes as carefully as I can, fingertips grazing the rise and swell of her breasts as I do—sue me, I’m not a fucking saint—and then I tuck her up under the sheets, warring with myself. I want to wake her up and fuck her. I also want her to be fully compos mentis the next time I screw her, so I manage to keep my dick in my pants. Fucking St. Peter’s Hospital. The place is determined to ruin my sex life.
Instead of accosting her in her sleep, I leave Sloane to her dreams and head back downstairs. The table is exactly how I left it, except now the food is stone cold and the candles have all guttered out. Did I cook for her? Hell fucking no. But you’d better believe I tried, and when that failed, ordered in her favorite Thai food. The Pad Thai looks like a congealed mess on the plate now. I collect everything up and toss it into the trash, kind of glad she didn’t make it back in time.
I’d been impulsive. I was going to do something rash, and now I’m a little fucking relieved things didn’t work out the way I was planning. After seeing Sloane at the hospital tonight, the last thing she needs is me acting like a lovesick teenager, making rash calls and disrupting her shit. She needs to focus. She needs to concentrate on being the best she can be at her job. I won’t stand in the way of that. Not again.
I hang up my leather jacket, removing the gift I’d planned on giving her tonight from the pocket. I close my fist around it, shaking my head, wondering what the hell I was thinking. The gift goes into the back of a drawer behind a stack of papers, and I put it out of my mind.
I tell myself that I do.
But when I go to sleep, hand lying heavy on Sloane’s hip, I have a dream. It’s not a dream about fighting in the dark, and it’s not a dream about my mother crying in the front seat of a car. It’s a dream of something much sweeter.