to remind herself that she had been kidnapped, threatened, and brought into a criminal hideout because powerful men were terrified of losing a powerful man.

Instead, Carmine’s pulse fluttered beneath her gloved fingers.

She made herself choose the patient.

“I need another pair of hands,” she said.

“Steady hands.

Not shaking.”

Dominic looked at his own fingers.

They were trembling.

A younger guard stepped forward.

He could not have been more than twenty-five.

His face had gone pale, but his hands were still.

“I can do it,” he said.

“Name?”

“Nico.”

“Nico, stand here.

When I tell you, press gauze exactly where my finger is.

Not near it.

Exactly.

If blood comes fast, you press harder and you do not faint.”

Nico nodded.

Clara used more saline.

She widened the incision by a careful fraction, enough to see what the forceps had felt.

The bullet had lodged deep beside inflamed tissue, partly trapped against a pulsing vessel.

Not through it, thank God.

Pressing it.

Irritating it.

Waiting for one careless tug to turn the room red.

She could leave it there and hope antibiotics bought time.

But Carmine had already waited three days.

The infection had a path.

The bullet was part of that path.

If she closed him up around it, he might die before dawn.

“I can try to move it away before I pull,” she said.

“But if bleeding starts, I need pressure immediately.

Then I pack and pray.”

Dominic’s voice was hoarse.

“Do it.”

Clara looked at Carmine.

“You understand me?”

His stare held hers.

“Try.”

That was not consent in any proper hospital sense.

Nothing in the room was proper.

But it was the closest thing to permission she was going to get.

Clara adjusted her grip.

For one second, she heard the whole building around her: pipes ticking in the ceiling, wind pressing loose metal outside, a guard breathing too loudly by the door, saline dripping through the IV line.

Then she heard Leo coughing in her memory, small and tight in the chest, and she almost lost her nerve.

She forced it back.

“Now,” she said.

Nico pressed where she pointed.

Clara used the forceps to ease the bullet sideways by the width of a fingernail.

Carmine’s back bowed.

Dominic leaned his full weight into him.

Blood surged, then slowed under Nico’s pressure.

“Hold,” Clara snapped.

“I am,” Nico said through clenched teeth.

She repositioned.

The bullet shifted again, no longer kissing the vessel.

Clara closed the forceps around it and pulled with terrifying patience.

It resisted.

For one awful second, she thought it was caught on something she could not see.

Then it came free.

A small, dark, misshapen piece of metal slid out of Carmine’s body and dropped into the stainless tray with a sound far too delicate for what it meant.

Tink.

No one spoke.

The bullet sat in the tray under the lamp, blackened with blood and tissue.

Clara did not let herself feel relief.

Not yet.

“Pressure,” she said.

Nico pressed fresh gauze into the wound.

Clara flushed again, cleaned more dead tissue, and packed the track carefully.

Carmine’s breathing hitched, steadied, hitched again.

The saline bag was almost empty.

“Hang another,” she told Dominic.

He obeyed immediately.

For the next twenty minutes, the room belonged to Clara.