Chapter 4 - The Safehouse and the Sisterhood
The interior of the Inwood Animal Hospital smelled faintly of antiseptic, wet fur, and old linoleum.
As Nora kicked the back door open with her boot, dragging Damian inside, a sharp, startled voice called out from the back examination room.
"We're closed unless you've got a dying German Shepherd with bloat—"
A woman in her late thirties, wearing green scrubs stained with what looked suspiciously like iodine and cat hair, stepped through the doorway. Her eyes widened to the size of saucers as she took in the scene: Damian Castellano, bleeding profusely, hanging onto a curvy diner waitress who looked like she had just survived a war zone.
"Leo?" Damian rasped, his knees buckling.
"Holy Mother of God," the woman breathed, rushing forward to grab Damian’s other side. "Leo’s my brother, I'm Dr. Elena Castellano. Damian—what the hell happened?"
"Vincent," Damian groaned as they dragged him down the hallway and heaved him onto a stainless-steel examination table usually reserved for large dogs. "Ambush at the garage. We need the kit, Elena. Now."
Elena didn't waste a single breath on questions. Her hands moved with clinical, terrifying speed, grabbing surgical scissors, antiseptic, and heavy-duty suture trays from the steel cabinets. She looked up at Nora, whose apron was soaked in blood and whose hands were smeared with red.
"You," Elena said sharply. "Are you with Vincent?"
"I work at the diner where he crashed," Nora replied, her voice steady despite the adrenaline crash beginning to set in. "I'm the one who had to shoot his hitman."
Elena paused, staring at Nora for a full second, a flicker of grim respect crossing her sharp features. "Good. Grab that tray of clamps and hold the pressure on his lower flank while I cut away this shirt. If he goes into septic shock before I can clamp the bleeder, we're both dead."
For the next two hours, the back room of the animal clinic turned into a makeshift battlefield surgical ward.
Nora didn't flinch. She had spent years watching her mother stitch up livestock on their small Ohio farm before things went south; she knew how to hold a clamp steady, how to swab blood without flinching, and how to keep a dying man anchored to consciousness by sheer force of will.
By 5:30 a.m., Damian was stable, his breathing deep and even under the influence of heavy sedatives and local anesthesia. A thick white bandage wrapped tightly around his ribs, pinning his arm to his side.
Elena slumped into a rolling plastic stool, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her gloved hand, before ripping the latex gloves off and tossing them into the biohazard bin.
"He's going to live," Elena sighed, looking up at Nora with exhausted, curious eyes. "Which is more than I can say for the rest of our family if Vincent finds out where we are."
"Vincent already knows his hit squad failed," Nora said quietly, leaning against the counter, her arms crossed over her stained apron. "And even if he doesn't know this exact clinic, my car is parked out back, my apartment is flagged, and my job is gone. I'm as burned as a toasted marshmallow."
Elena offered a tired, wry smile. "Welcome to the Castellano family reunion. Punch is in the back, though it mostly tastes like iodine."
Nora didn't smile. She walked over to the stainless-steel table, looking down at Damian’s pale, sleeping face. The terrifying aura of the "Mafia Boss" had vanished, leaving only a man broken by betrayal, fighting for breath in a freezing veterinary clinic.
"He can't stay here," Nora said.
"He can't move for at least forty-eight hours," Elena countered. "If we transport him now, the sutures will blow, and he'll bleed out in the back of the SUV before we hit the George Washington Bridge."
"Then we don't move him," Nora said, her voice hardening with a sudden, resolute determination. "We fortify."
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Elena raised an eyebrow. "Fortify? With what? A couple of surgical scalpels and a bag of dry dog food?"
"With whatever is in this building," Nora said, walking toward the front reception desk. "And with whatever I can scavenge. If Vincent wants his brother dead, he's going to have to come through us first."
