Chapter 3 - The King of Puget Sound
I turned around instantly.
The scarred stranger who had carried Owen through the front doors—the man who had spent the last two hours quietly holding pressure on wounds, assisting me with medical gear, and standing like a silent sentinel—was lying motionless on the white floorboards.
His knees had buckled beneath him.
"Nora!" Kyle yelled, backing away.
I dropped my suturing equipment and rushed to his side. The man was flat on his back, his jaw tight, his skin cold and clammy with profound surgical shock. I unbuttoned his soaked wool coat, pulled open his dark shirt, and gasped.
Beneath his ribs on his left side was a jagged, angry puncture wound, heavily infected and leaking dark blood. He had been bleeding internally for hours. He had hidden a life-threatening abdominal injury while helping me treat nine other men.
"What is his name?" I shouted to the men sitting along the wall. "Who is he?"
None of the bodyguards answered. They looked at each other nervously, their hands drifting toward their jackets.
"Answer her!" Owen's raspy voice cut through the silence from the exam table.
I looked back at my brother. Owen was staring at the unconscious man on the floor, his face pale as a sheet.
"Owen, who is this man?" I demanded, pressing clean gauze against the stranger's abdomen.
Owen swallowed hard, his voice trembling. "That's Roman DeLuca."
A heavy, suffocating silence dropped over the clinic like a lead blanket. Even Kyle stopped moving.
Roman DeLuca.
You couldn't live in the Pacific Northwest without knowing that name. He was the shadow billionaire who controlled the industrial shipping docks along Puget Sound, private security networks stretching from Seattle to Vancouver, commercial real estate, and enough high-ranking political figures to ensure his name was spoken with quiet reverence in county courthouses.
The local news outlets called him an elusive maritime logistics mogul. The street rumors called him what he truly was: the undisputed boss of the DeLuca crime syndicate.
And now he was dying on the floor of a low-income clinic outside Tacoma, his blood pooling around my knees.
"He took a piece of shrapnel during the ambushed drop at the harbor," Carter Mills whispered from the corner, his hand clutching his patched chest. "He refused treatment until everyone else was patched up."
"He's an idiot," I snapped, pulling a flashlight from my pocket and shining it into Roman's pupils. Sluggish. He was slipping into hypovolemic shock. "His blood pressure is crashing. I need two units of O-negative blood, an IV pole, and a central line tray right now!"
"Nora," Kyle whispered, trembling violently. "If he dies here... if the police find out a mob boss died in our clinic..."
"He's not dying on my floor," I said, my voice dropping into that icy, dangerous calm that had once terrified the surgeons in Portland. "Kyle, get the blood bags from Storage B. Move!"
For the next ninety minutes, the clinic became an operating room. I performed a blind bedside cutdown, inserting a central line directly into Roman DeLuca's subclavian vein under manual guidance. I hung two bags of cold universal blood, squeezing them by hand to force life back into his system while I packed his deep abdominal laceration with hemostatic gauze.
By 4:45 a.m., his breathing smoothed out. His heart rate settled into a strong, rhythmic cadence. The color returned to his high cheekbones, and the ice-cold chill vanished from his skin.
I sat back on my heels, drenched in sweat, my scrubs stained with the blood of a billionaire mob king.
A groan echoed from the floor. Roman's eyes slowly opened. Gray, sharp, and instantly focused, his gaze locked directly onto mine. He didn't look disoriented. He looked like a predator waking up from a brief nap.
"You're alive," I said, catching my breath. "Though you didn't deserve to be after hiding a third-degree puncture wound for three hours."
Roman looked down at the central line taped to his chest, then at the empty blood bags hanging above him, and finally back to my face.
"You broke your corporate lock," Roman said, his voice deep, rough, and gravelly.
"I saved ten lives," I corrected him, standing up and wiping my hands on a towel. "Including yours, Mr. DeLuca."
He stared at me for a long, heavy moment. Then, with effortless power, he sat up on the floor, ignoring the pain in his abdomen, and swung his long legs around. He looked around the room—at his nine men, all stabilized, wrapped, and resting quietly.
He stood up slowly, towering over me. Up close, his presence was overwhelming—an aura of absolute power and lethal composure.
"What is your name?" Roman asked softly.
"Nora Whitaker."
"And your current salary at this facility, Nora?"
I frowned, caught off guard. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"Answer the question."
"Seventy-two thousand a year," I said defensively. "When corporate actually pays us on time."
Roman reached inside his coat, pulled out a heavy gold pen, and wrote a short sequence of numbers on a paper prescription pad sitting on the desk. He tore the sheet off and handed it to me.
I looked at the paper. It was a formal contract commitment line, followed by his signature, and a number that made my heart physically skip a beat.
Two Million Dollars Annually.
"What is this?" I asked, my voice barely audible.
"An offer," Roman said, stepping closer until he was standing less than a foot away from me. His gray eyes burned into mine with intense, hypnotic gravity. "My private medical team was compromised tonight by an insider threat—which is why my men were targeted. I need a personal Chief Medical Officer who cannot be bought, who doesn't panic under fire, and who treats a human life with absolute dedication regardless of who they are."
He glanced over at Owen, who was watching us from his table with wide eyes.
"Your brother is one of my most trusted tactical drivers," Roman continued, returning his gaze to me. "He never told me he had a sister who could perform military-grade trauma surgery with stolen supplies in a closet."
"I am a clinic nurse, Mr. DeLuca," I said, trying to hold my ground despite my spinning head. "I don't work for... organizations like yours."
"You work for hypocrites who lock away medical supplies while people suffer," Roman countered smoothly, his voice dropping into a low, persuasive rumble. "Come with me, Nora. I will give you a private, state-of-the-art medical facility. I will protect your brother from the people who tried to kill him tonight. And I will clear your medical license in Oregon within thirty days."
May you like
My breath caught in my throat. "You can't do that. The Oregon board—"
"The Oregon board is owned by three men who owe me favors," Roman interrupted without a flicker of doubt. "Say yes, Nora. Or stay here and wait for your corporate bosses to fire you at sunrise for breaking a plastic seal."
