Chapter 1 - THE MAN WHO DIDN'T BLEED OUTThe waiting room at St. Ambrose Mercy at 3:14 AM was a sterile cavern of fluorescent light, smelling faintly of bleach and stale decaf. When Viktor Vance slid onto the molded plastic chair, he didn't slump. His spine remained rigid, his shoulders squared against the agony tearing through his lower left abdomen.
A dark, widening stain was soaking through the wool of his heavy charcoal overcoat.
At the triage desk, a night-shift nurse named Clara glanced up from her terminal, ready to deliver her standard, weary greeting. The words died in her throat. She had seen gunshot wounds before—this city was generous with them—but she had never seen a man take a .45 slug to the gut and look at the wall clock with the bored irritation of someone waiting for a late bus.
"Sir?" Clara stood up, her hand hovering over the call button for security. "Sir, you need to come back—"
"I need a table," Viktor said. His voice was a low, gravel-scraped rasp, steady as a metronome. "And I need someone who doesn't report every hole in a coat to the precinct. I have cash. And you have a shift supervisor who likes her mortgage paid."
Clara swallowed hard, her eyes darting to the blood pooling on the linoleum. "The trauma bay is locked. I can't—"
"You can," Viktor interrupted, sliding a heavy, unsealed manila envelope across the counter. It didn't rustle with paper; it thudded with the dead weight of stacked currency. "Or I can bleed on your floor, and when the cops arrive, I'll tell them you made me wait while I recited your home address. Walk me back, nurse."
Three minutes later, Viktor Vance was sitting on the edge of exam table four, his coat unbuttoned to reveal a ruined shirt and a shredded mess of flesh where a hollow-point had torn through muscle and missed his descending aorta by less than an inch.
He didn't flinch when Clara cut away the remaining fabric. He didn't cry out when she irrigated the wound. He just stared past her shoulder, his pale blue eyes fixed on the blank, humming television mounted in the corner.
"The bullet is still in there," Clara whispered, her hands shaking as she held the forceps. "I can't dig it out without a surgeon. If I touch the wrong artery, you'll bleed out in ninety seconds."
"Then call your surgeon," Viktor said softly.
"At three in the morning? On a Sunday? The on-call is forty minutes away."
Viktor closed his eyes for a long, slow beat. When he opened them, the cold calculation in his gaze could have frozen liquid nitrogen. "Then we don't have forty minutes. Do your job, nurse. Stitch the edges. Stop the bleeding from the outside. I've survived worse things than a rusted slug in my belly."
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"You're going to go into septic shock," she warned.
"Let the infection worry about that," Viktor muttered, leaning his head back against the wall. "Just keep me breathing until the sun comes up. I have a debt to collect."
