Chapter 3 - Red Floor
The red emergency lights turned the trauma suite into a chamber of blood and shadows.
Phut. Phut. Phut.
The sound of suppressed gunfire outside the door was methodical, precise, and horrifyingly close. There were no shouts, no security alarms, no frantic announcements over the hospital’s public address system. The men moving through the fifth-floor corridor were professionals executing a quiet, systematic purge.
Logan buried his face into the crook of my neck, his small body trembling violently. I wrapped both arms around him, backing into the corner between a stainless-steel storage cabinet and the wall, using my own body as a shield.
“Matteo,” Alessandro said, his voice flat and command-oriented despite his wounds. He threw his legs over the edge of the gurney, forcing his upper body into an upright position. A sharp groan tore from his throat as the movement tore his fresh surgical sutures, fresh red blood seeping through his white bandages.
“Boss, you can’t stand,” Matteo warned, not taking his eyes off the thick oak door.
“If I lie here, I die here,” Alessandro growled. He swung his feet down until his bare soles hit the cold, blood-slicked tile. He wobbled for a second, his massive frame swaying like an oak tree in a storm, before he stabilized himself by gripping the aluminum IV pole.
He looked at me in the crimson gloom. “Catherine. Get down on the floor behind that cabinet. Do not make a sound, no matter what happens in this room.”
“Who is out there?” I whispered, my heart hammering so hard I could hear it echoing in my ears. “Is it the police?”
“No,” Alessandro said, reaching onto the surgical tray and picking up a heavy pair of stainless-steel arterial clamps. “The police were paid to take a fifteen-minute coffee break at the gas station three blocks away. The men outside are Vanguard’s wet-work team. They came to make sure my heart stopped permanently... and to collect anyone connected to David Winters.”
A sudden, violent thud rattled the oak door.
The brass lock groaned under the force of a heavy boot.
Matteo didn't hesitate. He raised his suppressed pistol with both hands, firing three rapid shots straight through the center panel of the door at chest height.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
A wet grunt echoed from the hallway, followed by the heavy thump of a body striking the linoleum. But almost instantly, two tactical breaching charges were slapped against the hinges of the door.
SPARK. BOOM.
The door was blown inward with a deafening crack, wood splinters and metal shrapnel spraying across the room.
Two men in dark grey tactical uniforms, wearing night-vision goggles and ballistic vests with no insignias, rolled through the smoke into the suite. Their weapons—short-barreled submachine guns equipped with thick suppressors—were raised and sweeping the room before the dust even settled.
Matteo fired twice. The lead attacker caught a round in the throat, stumbling backward into the hallway, but the second attacker raised his weapon and stitched a line of fire across Matteo’s chest.
Phut-phut-phut-phut.
Matteo froze, his eyes going wide, before he collapsed onto his back, his heavy pistol clattering across the tile floor toward my feet.
The surviving attacker stepped over Matteo’s body, his weapon swinging toward Alessandro, who was standing beside the gurney holding his IV pole like a spear.
“Alessandro Romano,” the attacker’s voice was metallic, distorted by a tactical throat microphone. “Orders are absolute.”
Before the shooter could press the trigger, I acted without thinking.
The desperate, instinctual fury of a mother protecting her child took over my body. I didn't think about the gun. I didn't think about the blood. I reached out with my foot, grabbed the heavy stainless-steel trash bin packed with seventy pounds of discarded surgical waste, and kicked it with all my strength directly into the back of the shooter’s knees.
The heavy bin slammed into his joints.
The man lost his balance, stumbling backward into the operating table. His submachine gun discharged into the ceiling—phut-phut-phut—plaster dust and shattered light glass raining down upon us.
Alessandro moved with terrifying speed for a man who had been legally dead twenty minutes prior. He stepped forward, drove the sharp steel tips of the arterial clamps directly into the attacker’s exposed neck above the ballistic collar, and twisted his wrist with cold, mechanical precision.
The shooter let out a strangled gasp, his hands dropping his weapon as he fell to his knees, clutching his neck.
Alessandro grabbed the fallen submachine gun from the floor, pulled the attacker’s tactical knife from his vest sheath, and finished the man with a swift, silent blow.
The room returned to a sudden, suffocating quiet, broken only by the rapid beep-beep-beep of the battery-powered emergency monitor and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
Alessandro stood over the two dead men, his hospital gown soaked in fresh red blood, his face pale as chalk, but his eyes burning with an unholy, indomitable energy.
He looked down at me as I crouched in the corner, holding Logan, who was sobbing silently into my neck.
“You have good instincts, Catherine,” Alessandro rasped, racking the bolt of the captured submachine gun. “Your husband trained you well.”
“He didn't train me,” I sobbed, my voice trembling violently. “I’m a school teacher! I clean toilets!”
“Not anymore,” Alessandro said, stepping over the bodies toward the ruined doorway and checking the corridor. “The hallway is clear for the moment, but their perimeter team will be moving up the fire stairs within two minutes. We need to move.”
“Where?” I cried. “The hospital is surrounded!”
“This hospital has a subterranean service tunnel built during the Civil War that connects the main basement to the old boiler house three blocks away,” Alessandro said, turning back to me, holding out his left hand. “My primary vehicle is waiting at the exit.”
I looked at his outstretched hand—heavy, covered in dried blood and gun oil. Then I looked at my son, whose tiny hands were wrapped around my scrub top.
I knew that if I stepped out of this room alone, if I went back down to the supply closet or tried to walk out the front entrance, Vanguard’s men would find us before we reached the street. They knew David was alive. They knew Logan existed.
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My old life—the quiet, clean life of Catherine Winters, the grieving widow who worked the midnight shift—was gone, burnt to ashes just like the car on I-95.
I took Alessandro Romano’s hand and pulled myself up off the floor.
