First, though, I have to make sure she survives this surgery.
Again, I wish for Liam. My constant off-sider, we work in synchronicity. When we were kids, we were a team, protecting our little sister from the procession of step daddies who liked her a little too much; one of us hiding her away while the other fought the latest guy who was obviously not in our house because he enjoyed our mother’s company; and when our mother would slip, it’d be Liam holding her hand, calling an ambulance and prying her eyes open while I found a half-decent vein to inject the Narcan.
Yeah, I’m not a solo operator, that’s for damn sure. Fucking Ignacio.
As if reading my mind, Seraphina stirs momentarily. Ignacio appears at her side like a fucking ninja, all concern and fatherly care, a great charade for a man who kept a child for his own deviant pleasure for God knows how long.
“What’s happening?” Ignacio barks, taking her hand in his.
“She’s fine,” I say quietly, making no attempts to soothe the crazy bastard. “She’s probably having a dream. It’s twilight sedation. She’s not entirely under like she would be with a general.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, boy?” Ignacio says, clearly hating that I’m encroaching on his space, touching his property, knowing his dirty secret. He’s itching to shoot me. I glimpse the gold-plated pistol on his hip and have to force my eyes not to roll back in my head at the ludicrousness of this man. Yeah, looking back at his dark, determined eyes, I have no doubt that if it’s up to him, I won’t be leaving this water tower alive.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, old man,” I say, even though Ignacio isn’t that old. He’s probably fifty, wiry and fit, and I doubt he’s ever so much as tasted the drug that he supplies to thousands upon thousands of desperate addicts each and every month. He’s a smart man, a businessman.
A depraved man.
I continue to work, finally freeing the appendix from Seraphina’s abdominal cavity. Once it’s gone, sealed in a sterile plastic bag for disposal, I clean up the surrounds and can finally start to suture the wound closed.
“You told me she died,” I say, surprised at the hard edge of emotion that rattles in my words. It’s barely discernible, and my voice holds steady, but there is so much rage in my chest when I think about the past ten years. Rage for all of the nightmares, of the flaxen-haired girl who was one of my first patients outside of a hospital, back when people like Ignacio started to understand what an asset an off-the-books surgical resident could be to the sprawling arteries of the criminal underworld.
I look up, meeting Ignacio’s fiery gaze, remembering what Seraphina told me about him. He’s always saying it’ll be us who burn the world down together.
“What?”
I had to wait until now, until the sutures were almost complete, before broaching the subject with him. Because his fingers are already twitching at his side, and that usually means bullets, and bloodshed.
“This girl,” I say. “Seraphina. I treated her when she fell from the window ten years ago. You told me she died.”
I’d been back in Chicago with Liam and our sister, Moira, to get the right drugs and equipment to treat such a severe injury. The girl—this girl—couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old at the time. Ignacio had fed me a lie about how she was playing in the window when she fell, that her mother was working out in the fields. But now, seeing the thick boards across the windows, the ones that weren’t there ten years ago; I know. He lied. She lived.
I’ve been torturing myself about the way she died for ten fucking years; the crack in her skull, the pressure on her traumatized brain, but death probably would have been kinder than surviving. There are chains on the walls with black leather wrist straps, the girl is covered in bruises, and the windows are boarded up permanently. The fucking windows.
“Are you calling me a liar, Mr. Bishop?” Ignacio asks slowly.
“She has the fucking scar on her head where I stitched her up,” I snap, my eyes stuck to that spot just below her temple, the spot where she hit the earth below the window I’m working in front of, where her skull cracked and she fell into a coma.
I slide the last suture into place and snip off the excess, making a neat knot. Ignacio doesn’t reply. He knows I know. And that’s basically my death sentence, in his eyes; I can already see the decision made in his cool stare.
Do you want to burn the world down?
No, but I would like to see it.
“I’m a criminal just like you, Ignacio,” I say. “I break the law. I do bad shit, terrible shit. I’ve killed people, same as you. But this is some next-level shit. You kept a girl in a fucking water tower in the dark as your plaything for how long?”
Ignacio blinks, his face like stone. Unreadable. Fucking poker-faced asshole. Me, I’m struggling to tamp down the rage that builds inside me like a funeral pyre set alight. His funeral pyre, if I had it my way. My funeral pyre, if he had his.
“I suggest you pack your supplies up and leave, Mr. Bishop,” Ignacio says. His voice is like a razor blade across coals. They say you never feel more alive than when you’re in danger of dying, and they’d be on the fucking money. I’m going to die here if I don’t do something.
“First I need to tell you about her aftercare,” I say, making a show of placing my scalpel down and taking my gloves off. “See this here?” I point at the sutures holding Seraphina’s wound closed. “This yellow thread?”
He peers closer, looking for a thread that doesn’t exist. Idiot.
I’ve always got a few spare blades somewhere. These little scalpels might be small, but they’re sharp for a fucking reason. To slice a person open like a hot knife in butter. I slide my extra scalpel out of my surgical scrubs and sink it into Ignacio’s neck, up to the hilt, going for the jugular and praying I don’t miss. His eyes bulge as he reaches for his neck with one hand, the other going for his gun. And all this time his neck is spurting streams of dark blood on to Seraphina’s bare torso.
Fuck.
I wrench the scalpel from his neck and strike again, this time getting the meaty bit at the top of his arm. I’m most worried about what happens if he gets his hand on that gun. We’ll all be dead, and I refuse to be killed by a bullet that comes from a fucking gold-plated gun that looks like it belongs in some B-grade Steven Seagal movie.