Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Garrett. Undercover.
He was a cop.
I’d just saved Quincy’s brother’s life.
What would’ve happened had I left him there to die?
Practically kicking myself for the thought that had crossed my brain earlier, I stiffened my spine and gestured at him.
I swallowed.
“Go tell the nearest two nurses that I need them,” I said. “And I need a surgeon. They’ll know who to call.”
Quincy left at a sprint, which meant he knew how serious this all was.
Garrett didn’t have long.
Not without medical intervention, and someone who could fix what was wrong.
“What do you need me to do?” Nash asked.
His hands were covered in blood.
His shirt.
His shoes.
“We’re going to get some blood in him now that we have his brother here to tell us his blood type,” I said. “Go ask him, then go down to the lab. Look for someone who will help you get it. Tell them it’s a cop, and it’s urgent.”
God fucking damn them all for making this way harder than it needed to be.
So that was what Nash did.
Me and baby nurse worked, her trying to clean up the wound, and me with my fingers in the guy’s chest as we held on.
It took them less than two minutes to respond.
By that point, Nash was back with the blood and hanging it. Baby nurse was running the line. And I was praying that my limited knowledge in what to do in this situation would be enough to save Garrett’s life.
The surgeon came in and started talking a mile a minute.
Then we were moving, heading to the OR with me on top of the gurney, holding the bleeder closed.
We’d just made it out of the trauma room when a gurney from the room down the hall was wheeled out at a sprint.
Heart in my throat, I looked at the gurney with desperate eyes.
“Is he okay?” I asked when we both met in the hallway.
I didn’t reach for him. Not when I was covered in this much blood.
Felix’s face was pale. His hands were bloodless. His mouth was slightly open, and he had a breathing tube down his throat.
“Punctured lung, might’ve nicked the heart,” someone replied.
I looked over to that someone to see Rose covered in just as much blood as me.
Felix’s blood.
I closed my eyes and swallowed down the bile.
He’d make it.
He had to make it.
Please, please, please, Felix. Make it.
I opened my eyes and that’s when I made eye contact with Tammy.
She was sneering at me.
I looked away just as the elevator doors opened.
“Us first,” Tammy snarled.
I didn’t have any complaints.
Mackson, who’d been the responding surgeon for me, pulled us back without a word.
It was an unspoken understanding that our ER doc would get first dibs.
It sucked, but it was just what it was.
I watched as the elevator doors closed on my fiancé.
And the tears, which I’d held at bay so far, started to fall.
“Don’t fall apart on me now, darlin’,” Dr. Mackson ordered harshly. “We got a cop to save.”
I looked down at my hand in Garrett’s chest and said, “Yeah.”
The elevator opened, revealing nothing left but blood on the floor, and I watched it until the gurney moved too far forward to see it anymore.
Closing my eyes, I said one last prayer to whomever would listen, and steeled my spine.
He would make it.
There was no suitable alternative.
CHAPTER 22
Bring back lead paint. Survival of the fittest.
-Text from Felix to Val
FELIX
“She was so brave.”
I was fourteen hours post op from a collapsed lung, and multiple other things, but all I could do was smile.
“She’s a fighter,” I rasped.
My throat was still raw from the recent tube being in it, helping me breathe.
“You have no idea,” Mackson said as he watched Val sleep at my side.
I wasn’t sure when she’d gotten there. I was awake when she’d come in, looking utterly exhausted and broken.
I’d pulled her to me, and she’d all but collapsed, asleep in my bed seconds later.
“Tell me everything,” I urged.
Quincy, who’d just come from visiting his brother two doors down, said, “Well, I got the call from Val telling us they were here.”
I nodded.
“And I got the call from a nurse ordering me to come downstairs, that there was a consult needed.” Mackson shook his head. “So, Kelly and I came rushing downstairs. We both went to your room, but since he’s the expert on that, I let him take lead.”
“From what I was able to piece together,” Quincy said, “your woman helped my brother up off the floor and all but carried him into the trauma room when no one would help. She got him there—and this is all coming from that ‘baby nurse’ as Val kept calling her—and then started to work on him. The baby nurse came in with that famous race car driver, who might I add was a fuckin’ steal seeing as he is a trained medic and helped Val save my brother’s life. When I got in there, she had her fingers in his chest stopping some bleeding, she said.”