Chapter 1 - The Bullet in the Dark
The operating room was freezing.
Dr. Mary Andrews stood over the steel table, her soot-stained hands scrubbed raw and encased in sterile latex.
She did not let herself look at Vincent Martini’s face.
If she looked at his face, she would see the eighteen-year-old boy who used to bring her pastries in the middle of the night.
She forced herself to look only at the massive, bleeding trauma in the center of his chest.
Dr. Harold Morrison hovered nervously by the heart monitor.
He looked at Mary as if she were a vagrant who had wandered into his pristine sanctuary.
She ignored his disdain and extended her right hand toward the surgical nurse.
"Give me the retractors," Mary ordered.
The nurse placed the cold metal instruments into her palm without hesitation.
Mary moved with the precise, mechanical efficiency that had kept her alive in Chicago’s underground for a decade.
Vincent’s blood coated her gloves, warm and terrifyingly bright under the surgical lamps.
"His blood pressure is still dropping," Morrison warned, panic creeping into his voice.
"I am aware of his pressure," Mary replied calmly.
She carefully navigated around the fragile wall of the pulmonary artery.
The bullet was lodged deep, resting dangerously against the delicate vascular tissue.
One wrong move would tear the artery and drown Vincent in his own blood.
Mary held her breath, ignoring the ghosts of her past screaming in her mind.
She gripped the surgical forceps and reached into the narrow cavity.
The metal clamped down on the heavy lead slug.
"I have it," she whispered.
She slowly extracted the bullet, lifting it carefully out of Vincent’s chest.
She dropped the bloody projectile into a stainless steel basin with a sharp clink.
Morrison let out a massive sigh of relief.
"You actually did it," the chief surgeon muttered in disbelief.
Mary did not celebrate.
She stared down at the bullet resting in the metal bowl.
The blood washed away, revealing a highly specific, cross-cut pattern on the tip of the slug.
It was a custom modification designed to shatter upon impact, but it had failed to break apart.
Mary knew exactly who manufactured these specific, untraceable rounds.
She had dug them out of countless gang members in her underground clinic.
They were exclusively used by the Martini family’s top enforcer.
Mary looked up through the glass window of the operating theater.
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Vincent’s most trusted men were standing outside, watching her every move.
And standing right in the center of them was Rico Castellano.
