Chapter 2 - THE SECOND NEEDLE
Cora Marchetti’s skin turned a mottled, terrifying gray.
The silence in the room pressed down like lead.
No air moved in her chest.
Not a whisper.
Not a gasp.
Sloan Marchetti’s hand hovered over his sister’s cold forehead.
His knuckles were bone-white.
“She’s suffocating,” Sloan whispered.
His voice was a razor dragged across stone.
Del didn't look at him.
Panic was an enemy she had fought for a decade in trauma bays.
She reached back into Cora’s handbag.
Her fingers closed around the second orange cylinder.
“Hold her shoulders,” Del ordered.
Bishop stepped forward, his eyes wild.
“You already gave her a shot! You could stop her heart!”
Del snapped her gaze up.
Her eyes cut straight through the bodyguard.
“If I don't give her this dose, her heart stops anyway.”
Bishop froze.
Sloan shoved him back with one brutal forearm.
“Do it,” Sloan commanded Del.
Del ripped the blue safety release off the second auto-injector.
She positioned it four inches below Cora’s hip bone.
She drove it home.
Click.
Del counted under her breath.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
She pulled the needle out.
She leaned down, pressing her ear directly to Cora’s parted lips.
Nothing.
Del placed two fingers against the girl’s carotid artery.
The pulse was a fluttering bird, dying against her fingertips.
“Come on, Cora,” Del breathed.
She tilted the girl’s head back.
She pinched Cora’s swollen nose.
Del sealed her mouth over Cora’s.
She blew.
Resistance hit her lungs.
The swollen airway fought the air.
Del blew harder, forcing oxygen past the obstruction.
Cora’s chest rose a fraction of an inch.
Del pulled back, took a deep breath, and gave a second rescue breath.
Beneath them, Cora’s body convulsed.
A violent, ragged sound tore from the teenager’s throat.
It was a strangled, wet gasp.
Then another.
Air rushed into Cora’s starved lungs.
Color seeped back into her lips.
Faint, bruised pink pushing out the deadly blue.
Sloan dropped his forehead against Cora’s arm.
A shudder ran through his massive shoulders.
“She’s breathing,” Sloan choked out.
“She is,” Del whispered.
Her knees were screaming on the hardwood.
She tried to stand up.
The oversized, stained black canvas apron she wore caught on the edge of the dining table.
The worn fabric gave way.
A seam ripped with a sharp sound.
The apron slid off her left shoulder, pooling around her waist.
Underneath, her thin white uniform shirt stretched taut across her body.
Over a swollen, high, seven-month pregnant belly.
Sloan lifted his head from his sister.
His eyes tracked the sound of the tearing fabric.
He saw the belly.
Then his gaze climbed slowly, relentlessly, to Del’s face.
The dark walnut walls seemed to close in around them.
Sloan’s breath caught in his throat.
His steel-gray pupils dilated until they swallowed the light.
He looked at the curve of her jaw.
The small scar near her collarbone.
The fierce, amber-flecked eyes that had haunted his dreams every night for three long years.
The room vanished.
The dying sister vanished.
The armed men vanished.
Sloan rose to his feet like a ghost rising from a grave.
His voice wasn't a boss's voice.
It was a broken, bleeding thing.
“Delphine?”
Del took a step back, her hand flying instinctively to shield the child kicking inside her.
Before she could speak, the private dining room door kicked open.
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A man in a black trench coat stood in the hallway, leveling a silenced submachine gun directly at Sloan’s chest.
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