Chapter 1 - The Trap in the BlizzardThe needle in my vein pulled dark crimson out of my arm, filling the clear plastic bag resting on the scale beside my chair. Through the narrow glass panel of Trauma Bay 4, the surgical team moved in a frantic, silent frenzy around Elena Vasquez.
My heart hammered against my ribs—not with the cold, calculating instinct that had kept me alive through fifteen years of Chicago turf wars, but with a sudden, suffocating terror that made my throat tight.
Seventeen years old. The crescent scar beneath her left eye. The distinct, almond shape of her dark hazel eyes that mirrored my own reflection every time I looked in the mirror.
Sofia Bennett hadn't run away because she couldn't handle my world. She had run away because she was carrying my child—a child I had been told by high-priced specialists I could never father.
"Marco," I rasped out, my hand tightening over his wrist until the bones creaked. "Repeat what you just said."
Marco’s face was dusted with melting snow from the hospital entrance, his dark wool coat holding the sharp tang of gunpowder and freezing wind. He leaned down until his mouth was inches from my ear.
"The ambush on Enzo near the Chicago River... it wasn't a hit on Enzo, Luca," Marco whispered, his voice trembling with a rare, terrifying urgency. "We just intercepted an encrypted dispatch from Victor Moretti’s secondary crew. They didn't shoot Enzo to take out your underboss. They shot him to lure you out of your fortified estate on Lake Shore Drive directly to this hospital."
I stared at him, my mind spinning as the pieces of a brutal, seventeen-year-old puzzle slammed into place.
"And Elena...?" I choked out.
"Elena's car crash on I-290 wasn't an accident," Marco revealed, his jaw clenching tightly. "Moretti’s men staged the collision forty minutes ago. They knew Elena’s blood type because Victor Moretti has been tracking Sofia Bennett for seventeen years. They knew the city’s AB-negative blood supply was depleted after the warehouse fire on the South Side yesterday."
My breath caught violently in my chest.
Victor Moretti didn't just want to execute me in an alley. He had discovered my secret before I even knew it existed. He had orchestrated a horrific accident to force my seventeen-year-old daughter into a dying state, knowing that the only way to save her life would be for me to step into a sterile, unfortified hospital room and drain my own blood into a plastic bag.
"He set up a blood trap," I whispered, the words tasting like copper and ash on my tongue.
"The Moretti crew has already breached the perimeter at the south ambulance bay, Luca," Marco reported, his hand resting over his shoulder holster beneath his coat. "Eight men. Fully armed. They know you're hooked up to a transfusion rig, and they know you're weak."
Nurse Hannah Cole let out a terrified gasp from the corner of the donor bay, clutching a tray of sterile bandages to her chest. "Mr. Mancini... the bag is only three-quarters full! If we disconnect the line now, the girl won't survive the secondary surgery!"
I looked through the glass window at Elena’s pale face. Her heart monitor was chiming in weak, erratic hitches—a life hanging by a single thread of my own blood.
I looked at the plastic bag hanging from the scale, then turned my eyes to Marco.
"How long until Matteo arrives with the West Side strike team?" I asked, my voice dropping into an ice-cold register that made the air in the room freeze solid.
"Ten minutes, Boss," Marco answered. "They're fighting through the blizzard on the Eisenhower Expressway."
"Ten minutes is too long," I said smoothly.
I reached down with my left hand, grabbed the clear plastic tubing connecting the needle in my arm to the collection bag, and adjusted the flow valve to maximum.
"Mr. Mancini! What are you doing?!" Hannah shrieked. "Your blood pressure will crash!"
"Keep filling the bag, Hannah," I commanded, my gray eyes locking onto her face with absolute authority. "And when it's full, you take it into that operating room and you save my daughter. If a single Moretti soldier steps through that doorway before I come back... I want you to hit the emergency panic lock beneath the desk."
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I stood up from the chair before the needle was even pulled, my vision swaying for a fraction of a second as the sudden blood loss hit my brain. I reached into my discarded cashmere overcoat hanging on the wall rack, pulled out my primary weapon—a sleek, custom SIG Sauer P226 with an integrated suppressor—and racked the slide with a sharp, mechanical clack.
"Marco," I said, stepping into the red emergency light of the hallway. "Let's go greet our guests."
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