Healed Under the Mistletoe

by Amalie Berlin

  “I don’t want to come to dinner, you know me enough to know that.” He prowled back to his locker, and almost put the book inside, but the idea of corrupting the space set his teeth on edge. “Was it Conley? You told her about why I came to Sutcliffe, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t Angel.” Wolfe said her name pointedly, which assured Lyons would keep calling her by her surname. “I did tell her—we’re doing this thing where we don’t have secrets.”

  “Mistake.”

  Wolfe ignored his interruption. “But she isn’t a gossip. She hasn’t told anyone, though I don’t know why you want it to be a secret.”

  “Because I want Sutcliffe to be free of it. If people knew, they’d want to talk to me about it. I don’t want them to talk to me.”

  And he didn’t want pity. Or blame. Or reminders. He didn’t need any of those.

  And he didn’t want people saying, Oh, that’s why he’s such an ass.

  He had no interest in excuses. He was an ass because he was busy keeping everyone safe.

  He came to work early so he could take inventory of the patients and keep an eye on anyone who might become a danger.

  He poked his nose into all the rooms several times per day because he wanted to know who was there and who might harm his peers and other patients.

  “Have you asked her if she’s doing this?”

  “I haven’t. She told me the conversation you had and was as surprised that you seem to have an admirer as I was. She works with you, so she was probably the most surprised.”

  “Funny.”

  “Truthful.”

  “Well, ask her. If I have to ask her she’ll like me even less, and might hold it against you.”

  “She wouldn’t,” Wolfe said, and in that instant Lyons could hear the first sounds of irritation in his brother’s voice. “But I’ll ask her directly. Don’t go being a jerk to her just because she’s dating me. She’s suffering enough.”

  “Doesn’t seem like she’s suffering. She’s having a ball playing Christmas elf with you.”

  Wolfe took the subject change and reverted to form. “I told her she’d better bring that little green outfit home for a good game of Santa’s Naughty Little Mistress, but she said—”

  Lyons hung up before his brother could finish. Mostly because as he’d spoken, Lyons had started to imagine Sabetta in a little green elf outfit.

  It had been a thong.

  With a tiny bra.

  And little pointy, curly-toed shoes, which should be the disturbing part, but wasn’t. His body’s quickening was the disturbing part.

  But one glance at the book still in his hand and the mood left him. He slammed his locker shut and left, book in hand. He had to get to Lost and Found to make a deposit, then take his morning lap before his shift started. He didn’t have time or desire for his body to indulge in such a...disturbance.

  * * *

  Lyons’s whole day had held the tone set by that stupid book this morning.

  He’d been vomited on and had to change.

  He’d been chewed out by a cantankerous nonagenarian with a heart condition who was, “Just fine, thank you very much,” even though her heart rate was around one hundred and sixty beats per minute and her blood pressure made him marvel that she’d not already had a stroke.

  Finally, he’d missed the arrival of the addict who got violently angry over being given Narcan to save his life and ruin his high and tried to punch a nurse. Ineffectively, at least, but they’d been fortunate enough that the police had accompanied that patient and restrained him before he actually hurt anyone. They hadn’t been able to stop for help before every patient was alarmed, and probably half the hospital.

  He’d needed a cup after that and was slightly mollified to find that he’d left the gift card in his locker and purchased it himself.

  He’d just stepped through the doors into the department when his comm fired, summoning him to the east ambulance bay.

  He caught up with Sabetta in the east hallway, jogging in the same direction, pulling on gloves. “Do you know what’s coming?”

  “Shooting. Robbery. A couple, I don’t know if this is the shooter or victim,” she answered, and although he knew his feet kept going, he didn’t feel it. Not a single step vibrated up his legs. He could’ve been floating, except for the way his vision bounced.

  She might have said something else, all sound seemed to come from a long way away—muffled and garbled, like words shouted into a glass jar. Soon enough, they were at the ambulance bay, and the blaring siren finally cut through.

  Gunshot. Gunshot. He never took them, hadn’t since his own shooting. Someone had always been around to handle these situations, or they went straight to the trauma surgeons. But today they’d called for him on the comm. There was no avoiding it. There was no one else.

  The first ambulance stopped in the bay and the paramedics got out to help with the gurney.

  They weren’t supposed to ask the identity of the patient, but the fact that there was no cop in the ambulance with the woman said that she was a victim. He could think. He could do this. Help her.

  Sabetta took over holding the compression bandage, and they all ran into the hospital for the trauma room.

  “How many shots?” he asked, not wanting to lift the compress until they got her into the trauma room.

  “Looks like one, but she’s losing more blood than is coming out. We were there and as soon as he shot her the police moved in, so we got her here quickly,” the paramedic replied, carrying the bag of saline he’d hung, “but her pressure is falling fast. It’s only up enough now to function because of the saline.”

  First: stabilize her, preferably enough to wait on surgery.

  God help him, where were the trauma surgeons?

  They got into the room and he shoved his hands into gloves, his hands shaking but manageable.

  “Get her typed and hang blood. Now.” He barked at the nearest RN. “Do we know who she is? Get her record.”

  He lifted the bandage to look and blood rushed out.

  “It’s not clotting at all, is it?” Sabetta said, her voice trembling just a little—this affected her too, but he couldn’t try to take care of her now. Not and keep his mind together and help his patient.

  “Get a PT/INR. There’s a machine in the cabinet.” No need for a finger-stick, there was plenty of blood.

  He heard the cabinets opening as he used his free hand to squeeze the saline bag to pump a little more into her veins, though the blood already looked thin. Might be too thin to test for the presence of anticoagulants.

  It was too much blood. Bullets liked to ricochet around inside bodies, bouncing off bones and shredding organs. Organs bled. And then people died.

  He couldn’t put it off, hoping for a trauma surgeon to show up, he had to open now and find the source of the bleeding.

  “Drape her and get an anesthetist here now.”

  He pressed Sabetta’s hand to the quarter-sized hole in the woman’s side. “Compress.”

  She nodded and swapped in some fresh gauze to pack the wound, leaving him to poke his head out of the trauma room and shout for more hands.

  Within five minutes, they had hung blood, brought in several extra units on standby and transformed the trauma room into a makeshift surgical suite. It was equipped for this kind of emergency, but he hadn’t had to use it for this since he’d come to Sutcliffe.

  There was nothing to do but shut it down, look at the task as a physical puzzle. It was a projectile, not a bullet.

  He cut down from the hole on her side, and the sheer amount of shredded tissue almost flattened him.

  Big bullets didn’t just slice through flesh, they caused crushing damage like a body hit by a high-speed train.

  He’d been luckier. His bullets had been small caliber. They hadn’t had
the power or angles needed to bounce around and cause damage. They’d passed through his chest, missing vital areas, through his shoulder...and out the back. Hers had ricocheted off one rib, splintering it, then ripped through her spine as the new shards of rib left damage tracks of their own.

  The left pulmonary artery was shredded, and he could see how little blood now reached the lungs by the color the tissue had turned. The left lung was pale. Gray. Dead.

  He did what he could to patch the artery. That was the primary source of the major blood loss. If he could stop that, he might be able to stabilize her. Then the surgeons could make the repairs to her body over the course of a few days, giving her time to heal in between.

  “She’s getting cold,” Sabetta said. He’d been feeling the same, but so focused, trying to hurry. He couldn’t let her get too cold.

  Even if she was alive, her blood wouldn’t be able to clot if her body temperature fell too low. At a certain point, there would be no hope.

  “Get her temp.”

  “Ninety-two.”

  “Put a heating blanket over her legs. Set it as high as it will go.”

  He found two other blood vessels that had been damaged, one on the surface of the heart, well beyond his experience level. He needed a trauma surgeon. Or a cardiac surgeon. Or a thoracic surgeon. Or just a damned surgeon. Instead, she had him. And he stitched the great cardiac vein? Left circumflex artery? God, he couldn’t tell which one it was in the damage, but he stitched.

  While he worked, he heard his team doing as directed, but it wasn’t working. She was getting colder.

  “Ninety,” Sabetta announced, and though he doubted she’d ever participated in a single surgery, every time he asked for anything, she provided.

  It took less than an hour for the patient’s temperature to drop past all effort to save her. He knew before he closed that she wouldn’t clot. That pulmonary artery was still oozing, and it was the first he’d repaired. Same for the one on the surface of her heart.

  Even the holes made by his stitches continued to ooze blood.

  It wasn’t going to work. Even if she’d been on anticoagulants, they’d given her sufficient fresh, un-medicated blood to put her blood back into a clotting range. It was her temperature. They just couldn’t get her warm.

  Before he closed, her heart stopped beating. It gave a couple of convulsive beats, then just quit. There would be no restarting it, he knew, but tried to massage the battered organ with his hands anyway.

  Nothing. Adrenalin didn’t help. Nothing they tried helped.

  “Lyons?”

  It was Ysabelle’s soft voice at his ear that stilled him.

  “You need to call it.”

  She was right. He knew she was right, but it took her gloved, bloody hand on his to get through.

  It hadn’t been like this when he’d been shot. He’d stayed awake for most of it. Felt the hot bolts of pain from the impacts, then from his friends picking him up from the blood-soaked floor to move to a stretcher. He’d seen the gray, grim faces, peering down at him, watched them pause and then lie when he’d asked about Eleni.

  He’d had Wolfe transfer him to another facility as soon as he’d been able, unable to look at them afterward. Then cut them out of his life. He should probably at least tell them he was okay now, but it would be a lie.

  He made the call and stepped back so the team could take care of her, mentally going over the protocol, the things he was supposed to do. “I need to see if there’s family.”

  “Not like that,” Sabetta said, directing his gaze down to the fresh scrubs he’d just changed into, now shiny and slick with so much blood it could only make the black material red by volume.

  She urged him out of the trauma room, and didn’t stop until she’d steered him into the office he liked to hole up in. “Do you have a change of scrubs in your office?”

  “My office?” Her words didn’t make any sense.

  “This isn’t your office?”

  “Communal...”

  “Oh.” She pulled the gloves off and threw them into the trash, then began to rifle through a cabinet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE OFFICE CABINETS had nothing to help Belle deal with an obviously shell-shocked and blood-covered Lyons.

  Gunshot victims had been the main situation for her to fear since she’d entered emergency medicine. If she was honest, that was probably a factor in her decision to always work at small facilities and Urgent Cares. Places that were unlikely to see a critical gunshot victim.

  But that decision had been made for her when she’d been unable to find such a position in New York during the time she needed.

  There had been a tight ball of panic in her chest through the whole struggle to help their patient, even without the weight of it on her shoulders as it had been on Lyons’s shoulders.

  She looked back at him and found him in exactly the same position she’d left him. He said nothing. His eyes were open, but he might not even be seeing her, as unfocused as they looked. He was naturally fair skinned, but now had a pallor rivaling the dead.

  Goodness, he couldn’t go talk to the family. Not like this.

  “Lyons?” She used his first name, and it got a reaction. He looked at her, or toward her. He’d held it together for the emergency surgery, but at that second, he was just gone. Retreated into himself.

  Sweet heaven, what had happened to him?

  She needed to get him changed. And herself. “Sit here.”

  It took very little for her to ease him onto the edge of the laminate desktop, and only a second to flick up the tag at the back of his scrub top to see the size. They had spare scrubs available to staff; she’d seen them when Angel had given her the department tour. She just needed badges...

  Looking down, she spied his hanging from the pocket of his scrub bottoms, snatched it up and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  It didn’t look as if he was going anywhere. He stared at the wall, didn’t acknowledge her words or anything, and if her heart hadn’t been in her throat before, now it felt clogged.

  She darted out of the office and ran for the staff room, and the scrubs machine.

  A couple of minutes later, she’d checked out scrubs for her and for him, grabbed a package of wet wipes and ran back to the office to find him there still.

  “Lyons?” She tried to say his name with the kind of steady strength she’d hoped would comfort him, but her voice disobeyed. It wobbled. Sounded pained. Scared.

  She tugged her own bloody top off and reached for the hem of his shirt and had it half up when he caught her wrists.

  Sitting on the edge of the desk put the tall Scot at eye level with her, and he came back into focus staring into her eyes. Despite the blood and the trauma, there was an intimate pull in the locked gaze. Not sexy, it wasn’t even like that, but connected. A connection strong enough that it strengthened her in return.

  “Ysabelle?” He said her name back, scowl returning as he pushed past the parts of himself that had been shredded.

  “There you are.” She kept her voice soft, gentle. “We’re changing, okay?”

  “Your top is gone.”

  “I was going to get you cleaned off before I put on my own clean top.”

  He looked down, noted her ruined bra and the dried blood still on her arms and torso, and focused. “I can do it. You... Do you have...?”

  She gestured to the big package of wet wipes. “Enough to get most of it until a shower is possible.”

  He nodded—apparently, she’d inferred the right question he’d been stumbling through—and pulled off both his tops. “Clean up. Take off that bra.”

  He turned his back to her, and to give him some semblance of privacy, she turned her back too. Using the wet wipes, she cleaned her face—certain there’d been some blood on her forehead—then wo
rked her way down. Neck. Shoulders. Then pulled off her bra, cleaned her chest and arms, and slipped her fresh top on.

  They’d not had time to gown. They’d not had time for anything.

  When she turned back around, he was dressed, but stood with his hands on the surface of the desktop, bent, as if he couldn’t support his own weight well enough to stand up.

  He was better now than he had been immediately afterward, but this was not a man who could go speak to the patient’s family.

  Would anyone else do it?

  “Sit,” she urged again, but this time steered him to a chair. The man, while far larger than she, was unnaturally pliant.

  When he was seated, still looking pale and dazed, the decision was made for her. She couldn’t let him go out there; it wouldn’t be a comfort to the family, and he might collapse under the weight of it.

  She didn’t want to do it, had never done this particular duty. She’d been present when bad news was given, but never death.

  Which was why when she’d wanted to come to New York, she should’ve held out for an Urgent Care position. She wasn’t equipped to deal with death talks. She wasn’t even sure she was equipped to deal with Lyons or help in any way that mattered.

  But she could share the load for today.

  Before she could lose her nerve or talk herself out of it, she said to his barely cognizant face, “You stay. I’m going to go talk to the family.”

  And then she stepped out. Just go do it. Don’t cry. Say they did all they could. Say she was sorry. Offer to listen. Answer questions. Lie. Lie and say the surgeon had been pulled into another emergency surgery, but that she had assisted. She could answer their questions. Just keep Lyons out of it; he wasn’t up for this conversation.

  A chaplain. She should bring a chaplain with her.

  Calling on the comm took a few minutes, but when the gentle-looking woman joined her, she went out in search of the family.

  Over the next quarter-hour, she explained to a grieving husband and son that the woman they called wife and mother would not be returning to them. That they’d done all they could. That the bullet had struck her heart. How sorry she was.