glanced toward the folding table.

“Bags.

In a cooler.”

“Marked? Tested? Matched?”

His silence answered her.

“No,” Clara said.

“Absolutely not.

You don’t pour unknown blood into him because you found it in a cooler.

You could kill him faster.”

“He’s dying now.”

“Then stop helping badly.”

Dominic’s jaw tightened, but he did not argue.

Clara leaned close again.

With sterile forceps, she followed the swollen path beneath Carmine’s ribs.

She moved slowly, counting each breath he took.

She felt torn muscle, slick tissue, resistance, then something hard where nothing hard should be.

Metal.

“I found it,” she said.

The room seemed to stop breathing with him.

Dominic leaned over her shoulder.

“Can you pull it out?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

Clara kept the forceps still.

Blood welled around them in a slow, dark pulse.

Not a flood, not yet, but enough to tell her the bullet was not simply resting in dead tissue.

“Something is touching it,” she said.

“Maybe a vessel.

Maybe scarred tissue.

Maybe bowel.

If I pull without seeing what it’s caught on, he could bleed out before I can pack it.”

Dominic swallowed.

“Then see it.”

“I am not a surgeon.”

The admission landed heavily.

Until then, Clara had let command carry her.

Orders were easier than fear.

But the truth stood between them now, bright as the industrial lamp.

She was a triage nurse.

A good one.

Fast under pressure.

Calm with chaos.

But she did not have a surgical team, imaging, anesthesia, or the legal right to be doing any of this in a meatpacking plant surrounded by armed men.

Carmine made a low sound in his throat.

His eyes opened again, unfocused but furious.

“Name,” he whispered.

Clara glanced at his face.

“Mine?”

His eyelids fluttered.

“Clara Hayes.”

Something shifted in his expression.

Not recognition.

Not exactly.

More like he had forced the name into some locked room in his mind and told himself not to lose it.

“Boy,” he breathed.

Clara went still.

“What?”

Carmine’s lips barely moved.

“You said…

boy.”

She looked at Dominic.

Dominic’s face had changed.

During the ride, she had told him she had a son waiting.

She had said it like a warning.

If she disappeared, people would look for her.

At the time, it had sounded like survival.

In this room, it sounded like leverage.

“No,” Clara said, pointing the forceps toward Dominic without removing them from the wound.

“Nobody goes near my son.

Nobody calls my babysitter.

Nobody uses his name.

I don’t care who this man is.

I will walk out right now.”

Dominic raised both hands, palms open.

“No one is touching your kid.

I swear.”

“Your swears are not worth much to me.”

“Then take mine.”

The voice came from the table.

Carmine was looking at her now.

Fever burned in his eyes, but something behind it had sharpened.

Pain had not made him gentle.

It had stripped him down to whatever lived underneath command.

“No children,” he whispered.

“Not yours.

Not anyone’s.”

The guards looked away when he said it, as if the words carried old weight in that room.

Clara wanted to ask what kind of man needed to say a rule like that out loud.

She wanted to ask how many other rules he had broken.

She wanted