Chapter 2 - The Crash Cart
The emergency room nurse didn’t answer right away. She looked at Victor’s soaked cashmere coat, his trembling hands, and the unmistakable fury masking his terror. She recognized him. In this part of the city, nobody lived long without knowing the name Victor Romano.
“Sir, the doctor is in there now,” she said cautiously, pointing down the tiled corridor. “You cannot go in.”
Victor didn’t listen. He pushed past the triage desk, the double doors swinging open with a violent smack against the rubber guards. The scent of antiseptic, blood, and cold ozone hit him like a physical blow.
Outside Room Eight, three armed security guards stepped forward, but they froze the instant they saw Victor’s face. Behind them, through the narrow rectangular glass window of the trauma suite, chaos reigned.
Elena lay on the gurney, paper-white, surrounded by scrubs and monitors. Her dark hair was splayed across the thin pillow, damp with sweat. A defibrillator monitor cast erratic green peaks and troughs against the walls.
“Clear!” a harsh voice barked from inside.
Victor’s heart slammed against his ribs. *No. God, no.*
A technician slammed the paddles onto Elena’s chest. Her body arched violently off the mattress, a sickening thud echoing through the insulated glass as she collapsed back down.
“Asystole,” someone shouted. “Push one of epi! Start compressions again! One, two, three, four—”
Victor slammed his fists into the glass. “Elena!”
The doctor, a gray-haired woman named Dr. Sterling, glanced toward the window with hard, furious eyes before returning to Elena’s chest. Her hands pumped rhythmically against Elena’s sternum.
Victor wanted to rip the steel door off its hinges. He wanted to buy the hospital, buy the doctors, buy God Himself if it meant making that flat green line spike again. For fifteen years, he had built an empire on fear. Politicians kissed his ring. District attorneys lost files when he asked. But standing here, separated by a quarter-inch of tempered glass, all his wealth and violence couldn't force a single breath into his wife's lungs.
*He doesn’t want to talk to you.*
The words sliced through his skull like a serrated blade. While his wife lay dying on cold Italian tile, begging for the sound of his voice, he had been lying in satin sheets, stroking another woman’s hair, too cowardly to pick up his own phone.
“Resume rhythm check!” Dr. Sterling commanded inside.
The compressions stopped. The room went silent.
On the monitor, a fragile, trembling blip appeared. Then another. A slow, agonizing rhythm: forty beats per minute, creeping to fifty.
“Sinus bradycardia,” a nurse announced, exhaling a ragged sigh. “We have a pulse.”
Victor pressed his forehead against the cold glass, tears burning his eyes. He exhaled a breath he felt like he’d held for an eternity.
Behind him, heavy leather footsteps echoed down the hall.
Victor spun around, wiping his face in an instant, his jaw hardening into granite. His underboss and longtime enforcer, Dante Cruz, strode toward him, his dark suit soaked from the storm.
“Boss,” Dante said under his breath, eyes flicking toward the hospital staff. “The doorman at the penthouse called me five minutes after 911 left. I secured the apartment.”
“What happened to her?” Victor asked, his voice low, raw, and dangerous. “She’s thirty-two. She runs five miles a day. How does she have a heart attack?”
Dante hesitated. That hesitation made the hairs on the back of Victor’s neck stand up.
“Dante. Talk to me.”
“The EMTs said her vitals collapsed unusually fast,” Dante whispered, stepping close so the nearby nurses couldn’t hear. “And something else. When my boys swept the penthouse kitchen, they found the French press on the counter. Elena had one cup of chamomile tea before she collapsed.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed. “And?”
“The kitchen window facing the fire escape was unlocked,” Dante said grimly. “Elena never leaves that window unlocked. Boss… this wasn't an ordinary heart attack. Someone poisoned her.”
Before Victor could process the words, the elevator down the hall dinged.
The doors slid open, and Selena Vale stepped out, still clutching Victor’s designer umbrella, her mascara slightly smudged, looking around the ER with wide, panicked eyes.
When she spotted Victor, she rushed toward him. “Victor! Oh, thank God. I was so worried about you. I couldn't stay in the apartment—”
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Victor didn't let her finish. In three long strides, he crossed the floor, grabbed Selena by the throat, and shoved her backward against the corridor wall, the air exploding from her lungs.
***
