Page 90 of The Cruel Heir
She had eyes like judgment and hands steadier than mine, and if I closed my own long enough, I could still hear the sound of her breath, when we kissed that night in D.C. beneath the fluorescent flicker of a supply tent. I didn’t deserve her. And she didn’t deserve the fallout.
But I left anyway.
And she hasn’t left my mind since.
That’s the kind of woman she is, the kind you ghost, but never outrun.
So when the Kingsley name crossed my path again, I boarded the flight, like a man marching back into the fire he swore he’d never touch again.
And that’s how I ended up in that city. That hospital. That room.
I’ve done a lot of procedures. I’ve opened up addicts and CEOs, stitched together gangbangers and billionaires. But nothing prepared me for Zara Kingsley.
When they wheeled her in, she was already halfway gone. Her vitals were crashing, her abdomen was tight with internal bleeding, and the baby’s heart rate was decelerating fast. It wasn’t supposed to be me. I wasn’t even supposed to be in thatcity, in that hospital. But Robyn had called in every favor she had, and someone whispered my name.
Then Sterling Kingsley got involved.
He didn't plead. He didn't beg. He pointed a gun at the surgical director, and told them to get out of the way. When I arrived, there was blood on the floor, a woman unconscious on the stretcher, and a man with murder in his eyes, pacing the OR like it was a battlefield.
“You’re going to save them,” Sterling had said. Not asked. Not hoped. Promised.
And I believed I could. I had done worse. I had salvaged shattered organs, with rusted tools and no anesthesia. I had sewn children back together on cartel floors. But this was different. Because this wasn’t just a body. It was his.
Zara.
She wasn’t just a patient. She was a battlefield, disguised as a woman, every part of her a reminder that I was not just stepping into an operating room, but into a war I couldn’t afford to lose.
I slipped on gloves with shaking hands. Scrubbed in silence, even though the inside of my skull throbbed with noise. I’d performed hundreds of emergency C-sections. But not like this. Not with the weight of a man like Sterling Kingsley breathing down my neck.
When I cut, I felt everything, every pulse, every slip, every ounce of blood that surged up and over the sterile field. It was like trying to suture a flood. The uterus had ruptured. Blood poured out in pulses. The baby’s cord was wrapped tight, like it had twisted itself into a noose. Every second counted, but my hands felt wrong. Slow. Heavy. Off.
The nurse beside me gasped, too green for this, trembling so badly she almost dropped the retractor. I barked at her to move, to clamp, to do something, and all the while the machines were screaming, Zara’s body convulsing under sedation.
Sterling didn’t leave the room. He loomed behind me like a demon.
“Do it,” he growled, when I hesitated.
“She’s crashing,” I said, sweat pouring down my spine.
“Then bring her back.”
I botched the first stitch, trying to close the uterine artery. Blood gushed, slippery and hot, soaking through my gown. I could barely see. The suction couldn’t keep up. My glove tore.
The baby came out blue.
No cry.
I passed her to the pediatric nurse. “Go. Now.”
They started compressions. I turned back to Zara.
Flatline.
“Code!”
My hands moved, before my brain could catch up. Compressions. Hard. Fast. Her chest cracked under the pressure.
“Don’t you fucking stop!” Sterling roared.
