Carmine Rossi’s eyes opened when the scalpel touched him, but the man who looked up at Clara Hayes was not the legend Chicago whispered about.

He was not a king of concrete contracts.

He was not the name that made union foremen lower their voices.

He was not the ghost behind half the city’s backroom deals.

He was a feverish, half-conscious man pinned to a stainless-steel table in the rear room of an abandoned meatpacking plant while a nurse he had never met cut into the infection that was killing him.

Dominic held Carmine’s shoulders down with both hands.

Two guards stood near the tiled wall with their guns hanging uselessly at their sides.

The room smelled of Betadine, old copper, spoiled tissue, and fear that no one wanted to name.

Clara did not look at the guns.

She did not look at the men.

She looked only at the wound.

“Keep him still,” she said.

Carmine’s body jerked once under the blade.

His fingers twitched against the edge of the table.

His lips parted, but no scream came out.

He stared at Clara as if he was trying to drag meaning out of her face.

“No hospital,” he rasped.

“You already made that clear,” Clara said without pausing.

“Now be quiet and let me work.”

One of the guards inhaled sharply, like he expected Dominic to punish her for speaking that way.

Dominic only pressed harder on Carmine’s shoulders.

“Do what she says, boss,” Dominic murmured.

That was when Clara understood something that frightened her more than the guns.

These men were not pretending to need her.

They were truly out of options.

The first incision opened the swollen tissue around the bullet track.

A rush of foul fluid spilled out, thick and yellow, streaked with blood.

One guard turned his head toward the wall.

Another crossed himself.

Clara packed gauze against the edge of the wound and kept going.

She had seen terrible injuries in the emergency department.

Knife wounds after bar fights.

Construction accidents.

Gunshots brought in by police with officers standing over the gurney.

But those patients came with trauma surgeons, blood banks, monitors, sterile operating rooms, and teams who knew exactly what to do when a body began to fail.

Here, she had a folding table of supplies stolen from a pharmacy, one industrial lamp, a cracked tile room, and men who believed power should be able to bully death into leaving.

It could not.

“More light,” she said.

Dominic nodded toward a guard.

“Marco.”

The guard moved the lamp closer until heat pressed against Clara’s cheek.

The brighter angle revealed what she feared most.

The infection had followed the bullet track deep into Carmine’s side.

Dead tissue clung to the wound in gray, stringy patches.

The skin around the opening was angry and stretched, his body fighting an invasion it was losing.

Clara cleaned what she could.

She cut away what had died.

She flushed the wound with saline until the basin below the table ran cloudy pink and gold.

Carmine’s breathing grew shallow.

“His pressure is dropping,” she said.

Dominic looked at the IV bag as if he could force it to empty faster by staring.

“We have more saline.

Blood too.

Arthur kept some.”

Clara’s hand froze.

“What kind of blood?”

Dominic