Chapter 2 - The Sniper in the Timberline
The heavy velvet curtains parted with a metallic rasp, flooding the vast master bedroom in a brilliant torrent of late-afternoon amber light.
Liam didn't shout. He didn't swear.
Instead, a sharp, ragged gasp tore from his chest as his entire body convulsed with violent adrenaline. With a superhuman surge of desperate strength that defied his fractured pelvis, he lunged across the bed, grabbed a fistful of my scrub top, and dragged me down against his chest just as a deafening CRACK shattered the silence.
The reinforced glass window didn't break—it spiderwebbed into an opaque white mosaic of hairline fractures, centered around a high-velocity tungsten bullet lodged directly at head height.
"Get down!" Liam roared, his voice vibrating against my ribs as we both tumbled onto the hard oak floor in a tangle of IV lines, torn bedsheets, and his agonizingly heavy weight.
The external fixator on his right leg slammed against the nightstand, and Liam let out an involuntary, guttural scream of agony, his face turning the color of chalk. Outside, alarms began to wail across the compound, high-pitched and relentless. Heavy combat boots pounded up the stairs, followed by the chaotic shouting of armed guards.
"Liam!" Leo kicked the bedroom doors wide, his semi-automatic pistol drawn, three tactical guards flanking him with rifles raised. "Sniper at the south tree line! We have perimeter teams sweeping the ridge!"
"Draw... the blackout blinds," Liam choked out through clenched teeth, sweat pouring down his temples. He was pinning me beneath him, his broad chest acting as a human shield, his heart hammering against mine like a trapped bird. "Do it now, Leo."
Leo lunged for the backup steel security shutters, hitting an emergency wall switch. Heavy motor-driven steel plates descended over the windows with a heavy, final thud, plunging the room once again into pitch-black safety.
Liam collapsed entirely, his forehead resting heavily in the crook of my neck, his ragged breaths burning against my skin.
"You absolute idiot," he rasped into my collarbone, his voice trembling from unbearable physical shock. "I told you... not to touch the cord."
"I thought... I thought you were just brooding," I whispered, my heart racing at a hundred and fifty beats per minute, my hands instantly searching his side for fresh hemorrhaging. "I didn't know someone was hunting you from the ridge."
"Everyone is hunting me, Clara," he breathed, using my first name for the very first time.
Leo hurried over with two guards, carefully lifting the massive crime boss back onto the bloodstained mattress. Liam’s surgical sutures along his oblique had torn open under the strain, and fresh, bright crimson was already saturating his gray sweatpants.
"Get the surgical kit," I ordered Leo, all my shock instantly converting into clinical adrenaline. "Now! And get me two bags of normal saline, high-potency lidocaine, and sterile 3-0 prolene sutures!"
"Can you fix him here?" Leo asked, his scarred face grim. "We can't transport him to a public hospital. Russo's men have spotters outside every emergency room in Cook County."
"I don't need a hospital," I snapped, snapping on sterile gloves and ripping open a suture pack with my teeth. "I need light, I need silence, and I need you to hold his shoulders down."
For the next forty-five minutes, I operated on Liam Mercer without general anesthesia. With only local numbing agent blunting the agony, I irrigated the reopened wound, tied off two bleeding subcutaneous vessels, and threw eight precise, tight mattress stitches across his flank.
Throughout the entire agonizing procedure, Liam never cried out. He gripped the iron bedpost until his knuckles turned bloodless white, his jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched violently in his cheek, his piercing blue eyes locked unblinkingly onto mine.
When I finally tied the last knot, cut the thread, and taped a fresh sterile pad over his ribs, the silence in the room was deafening.
I wiped a streak of sweat and blood from my forehead with the back of my wrist. "You could have let the bullet hit me."
Liam turned his head toward me in the dim glow of the bedside monitor. His face was soaked in sweat, his breathing shallow, but his gaze was terrifyingly lucid.
May you like
"You're Tommy’s only sister," he murmured, his voice faint as the delayed dose of IV analgesics finally began to pull him under. "If you die... who saves the kid?"
My breath caught in my throat. I had never once mentioned my brother's name inside this house.
