CHAPTERTHREE
Still alive andon the move, Jamie didn’t bother to open his eyes as the OR nurses wheeled him into the recovery unit. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. Open his eyes that is. His lids weighed seven hundred pounds. Each.
Didn’t matter anyway.
Kosamina was dead.
He should be too.
Voices. One familiar. His father talking about medical shit.
Machines whirred. Beeped. An alarm went off somewhere in the distance. So much noise. Fucking hospitals were loud. And dangerous.
Ow.Nurse Betty jabbed him in the back of the hand. With a needle the size of a javelin. The spear. Not the anti-tank missile. Warmth spread. Up his arm. Into his chest.
His brain fuzzed, and lights that weren’t on went out.
When he came awake the second time around, he found himself semi-reclined in a hospital bed in a dimly lit private room. Private being a relative term considering he wasn’t alone.
Asleep in his surgical scrubs, Samuel Atticus Snow sat crumpled over in a chair, his forearms folded over his ribs, his chin resting against his chest.
Fuuuck.
Not the angel of mercy he’d hoped to wake up to. A rich prick with a God complex, his father was the kind of man who thought the number of acronyms behind his name entitled him to…whatever the fuck he wanted. MD, PhD, MSc. Who the fuck knew what else? Who the fuck cared? Not Jamie. That was for damn sure.
He’d cut ties with his father when he joined the military.
Best decision he’d ever made.
Through a haze of morphine, he eyeballed the man who’d saved his life and wondered how he’d landed in his own personal version of hell on earth. Hadn’t he been through enough already? In between the low rumbles of oddly comforting snores, he sifted through his memories of the last twelve hours.
Kosamina. The baby. The gunman.
No!
Grief for the woman he’d once loved rocked him right down to the cellular level. His vision blurred, and a sharp spike pierced the center of his chest. Reliving the pain of Ko and her unborn daughter dying in the street was enough to stop a heart that had already ceased to beat.
Why?
Why had the gunman chosen this time and this place to take aim and pull the trigger?
Nausea coated his tongue with the taste of bile.
Jesus Christ.What did it matter why? Ko was gone. Her daughter gone. Cut down in a hail of bullets. Victims of a random act of violence? Or had Jonas Johnson and his men been watching the hospital this whole time, waiting for the day Jamie dropped by to see his pregnant wife?
No. He shook his head, and the room spun. Even with the painkillers messing with his brain, he knew Johnson orchestrating a mass shooting to kill one man made no sense. A single bullet between the eyes would have done the job just fine.
Nearby a machine whirred, and he felt his lids grow heavy.
Shit. The programable morphine pump.
His vision going dark around the edges, he fought the sweet pull of oblivion. There’d be no echoes of an automatic rifle in the black abyss of a drug-induced sleep. No screams or cries. No sadness or sorrow.
Unfortunately, unconsciousness wasn’t a viable option. Too dangerous. For him. For his father. For anyone else nearby. Outside the window, the inky blackness of the night sky gave him no clue as to how quick he needed to move, but guaranteed, his cover had been blown.
The only progeny of Mas Gen’s Surgeon-in-Chief, no chance in hell Jamie’s real name hadn’t been entered into the hospital’s patient database. Anyone looking for him would have found him by now. So yeah, the bad guys were on the way.
The good guys too. And he couldn’t lay back while his team put themselves at risk for a useless recovery mission. Fuck no. Too many people had died already.
