Lincoln Hospital (Trauma #1) (9 page)

Sliding the key into the lock, he opened the door and stepped into their home.  It was a modest house, three bedrooms and three bathrooms.  On the large side for just the two of them but they were hoping to try and start a family at some point over the next couple of years.  Timing seemed to always get in their way with both of their busy professions.

“Hannah?  Babe? Where are you?”  It was strange that she wasn’t puttering about in the kitchen fixing their dinner.  They both loved to cook and alternated on making meals depending on who got home first.  Since this was his heavier week at work, she’d been handling most of the cooking all week.

Confused at the silence that met him, he set the bouquet of flowers down on the counter and wandered into the living room. Finding nowhere there, he headed upstairs.  The house was eerily quiet, but he brushed it off thinking it was his imagination after a long shift at the hospital.  Thinking she might have wanted a nice hot bath after a long day herself, he opened the door to their bedroom.

“Babe? Are you—” he broke off at the sight before him and letting out a roar, rushed into the room.  Hannah was sitting straight up on their bed, hands and feet bound and mouth gagged, tears streaming down her face as she tried to scream from behind the sock stuffed in her mouth.  Enraged, he charged towards her not noticing the frantic shaking of her head.

A searing pain in the back of his head had him crashing to the floor as he was hit with a metal object from behind.  Hannah cried harder and her muffled screams got louder as Cian rolled to his side with a groan.  Looking up, he had a split second to shuffle across the floor out of the way as their assailant brought the crow bar down again, missing him by inches. He managed to get to his knees and tackle the other man to the floor where they rolled over the carpet in a flurry of legs and fists.  He got a few good hits in but the attacker outweighed him by at least one hundred pounds and hit like a sledgehammer.  He took a blow to the nose that had him crashing onto his back and seeing stars.

When he was finally able to sit up, he froze.  The man was standing with a gun to Hannah’s head, staring hard at him.  The fact that his face wasn’t covered told him that it was no normal robbery and that had Cian scared shitless.

“Okay, now just hold on.” He tried to gain his feet and grimaced when his head spun.  That damn hit really did a number on him. “Just put that down and tell me what you want.  Anything you want is yours.  You want money?  Name your price.  Just please, don’t hurt my wife.”

“Anything I want?  You can bring my brother back from the dead?  You got that kind of power, huh, tough guy?” He jammed the barrel of the gun hard into Hannah’s temple, ignoring her whimper of pain.

Cian inched forward again and the man cocked the gun.  “You want to stay right there, tough guy and don’t fucking move or I swear to God you’re going to be wearing her brains.”

Swallowing hard, Cian held up his hands.  “I’m not moving, I’m co-operating.  You’re in charge here, I understand that.  I’m sorry about your brother, really I am, but I don’t know how to fix that for you.”

“Ain’t no fucking fixin’ it!  It’s her fucking fault!” He grabbed Hannah by the hair and dragged her over to his side of the bed.  “Your fucking cunt of a wife sent him to prison and they fucking killed him in there.  Knifed him over and over like he was a damn pig.  He was my brother; he didn’t deserve to go out like that!”

Hannah’s eyes met Cian’s and she pleaded with him to help her, the terror she was feeling written all over her face. Feeling powerless, he wanted to lash out so bad he could taste it.  To rip her away from him and tuck her into his side where she would be safe.

“I’m sorry.  I really am sorry about your brother, but the blame belongs on the person that killed him in prison, not on us.  They are the ones you should be angry with, not my wife.  She would never have wanted anything to happen to him; look tell me...what was his name?  I bet she will remember the case if you tell us his name—she remembers every single case.”

The attacker looked skeptical for a moment but then his facial features smoothed out and his dark green eyes lost a bit of their edge of rage.  “His name was Roy Combs.  He was only twenty-one.”

Cian looked at Hannah and she nodded slightly, indicating that she remembered the case.  “Mr. Combs, my wife remembers your brother, please let her tell you what she knows, take the gag off and talk to her.  Just the gag, that’s all I’m asking.” Combs hesitated for a few minutes, the room growing more thick with tension if that was possible, but he gave in and he removed the gag from Hannah’s mouth.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, babe,” she burst out, looking at Cian.  “I love you so much, I didn’t know, I answered the door and ah—” she cried out when Combs savagely ripped her head back by the hair.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch.  You think I took that out so you could talk to him?  No.  You fucking tell me what you know about my brother right the fuck now.” Combs shoved the gun under her eyes, ignoring the way she squirmed and cried.

“Hannah, babe. Look at me. It’s going to be okay, I promise.  Just look at me, and tell him what you remember about the case, babe.” Not being able to be by her side was fucking ripping Cian’s heart out.  He needed to get him distracted long enough so that he could make a move and get her the hell out of there.

“R—Roy was a g—good kid.  He got in some trouble with the wrong crowd and took the fall for something he didn’t do.  I t—tried to get through to him, to get him to tell me who the real culprit was, but he was s—scared.  He took the sentence as a show of good faith to the crew he was running with.  I h—heard after, they put the hit on him not believing that he would keep his mouth shut.” Hannah dragged her gaze away from Cian and looked at Combs.  “He was a good kid, your brother.”

Combs let a single tear escape and nodded his head once.  “Yeah. Yeah he was a good kid.”

A small flutter of relief washed over Cian as he saw they’d finally gotten through to Combs.  All he’d needed was the truth and to know that someone cared about his kid brother.  It wasn’t so hard to understand in the grand scheme of things. Now all he had to do was—

“You fucking knew.  You fucking knew he was innocent and you let him go in there anyways.  It is your fucking fault! Your fucking fault!” Combs screamed, waving the gun around. Cian rushed forward and grabbed Hannah, dragging her off the bed and shoving her down on the floor.  Furious, Combs charged forward swinging out.  Cian ducked and avoid the punch but not the tackle to the midsection and they ended up on the floor again.  He could see Hannah out of the corner of his eye frantically trying to get her feet untied.  Once she succeeded, he rolled over on top of Combs with all his might and started raining down punches.

“Run!  Run, Hannah!” he ordered her, relieved that for once she wasn’t stubborn and listened to him.  Combs got his bearings back and rolled them back over starting to climb to his feet to chase her. Cian’s hand shot out and pulling his ankle was able to slow him down enough for her to make it out of the room.  Seconds later he heard her scream and scrambled to his feet wondering what the fuck had happened now.

He didn’t have long to wait to find out as she was dragged back into the room by another man, a shorter, stockier man who also had a gun.

“’Bout fucking time you showed up.  Get that bitch back in here,” Combs ordered, grabbing Cian’s arms and twisting them behind his back.  The second attacker complied, dragging a struggling Hannah back into the room. 

“Oh yeah, baby, keep wiggling that ass against me, I fucking love it.” His free hand cupped her breast roughly as he ground his hips into her.  “You’re a fucking real wild one aren’t ya?  Bet you’re a dynamite fuck.”

“Get your fucking hands off my wife!” Cian roared.  He managed to drag both him and Combs two steps before stars exploded behind his eyes once again and he crashed to the floor.  His vision swam and he barely felt the third blow of the crow bar come down across his head.  He got a brief glance at Hannah and thought he heard her scream out, “Cian, I love you!” before there was a loud bang and everything went black.

When he next opened his eyes, pain was his first realization.  Every molecule of his body was on fire.  An inferno of agony.  He tried to lift his hand and noticed there was a long white tube attached to it.  He recognized the ceiling of his bedroom and could see the feet of several different people as they moved around his room.  Sitting up, he blinked.

“H—Hannah,” he croaked, his voice dry and rusty. The female paramedic that was currently injecting something into the IV in his arm, set her mouth in a grim line and didn’t answer him.  “Where is she?” he demanded, pushing more steel into his voice.

“Mr. O’Reilly, you’ve suffered some major trauma to your head and we really need you to just lie still for now.”

“Where the fuck is she?” he yelled, losing all patience.  Dread was starting to coil in his belly.  He replayed the last few moments before he passed out.  The second assailant coming in, being hit from behind once more, the loud bang...

“Oh, God, no.  Please no.” Frantically his eyes scanned the room until they landed on a still form in the corner of the room covered with a white sheet.

“NO!” he screamed, shoving to his feet, knocking the paramedic over as he raced to fall to his knees beside the body.  “Hannah, please no.  Please, please babe, no.” He pulled the sheet back and the agonized scream that wrenched from his body at the sight of his wife lying dead on their bedroom floor broke every heart in the room.  Gathering her in his arms, he buried his face in her hair and let the tears fall, not caring who heard or saw him.  His wife, his beautiful, perfect wife.  Dead.  And it was all his fault.

“I love you, I love you.  I love you, Hannah. Fuck, no. Please no, baby.  Don’t leave me,” he whispered into her hair, rocking her body back and forth.

“Mr. O’Reilly.  Mr. O’Reilly, we really need to get you to the hospital to be looked at.  That gash on your head is serious. The police need to—”

“Get the fuck out. I’m a doctor.  I’m a fucking doctor.  Just get out and leave us alone.”  Deciding to give him a bit of time alone but still keep an eye on him, they backed off and left him to grieve in silence with his wife.

Several hours later, he finally let them take her from him and in a daze was loaded in the ambulance and transferred to the hospital.  The next few weeks were a blur as he underwent a minor cosmetic surgery to repair the damage to his skull and went through the motions of planning a funeral service.  When John Reynolds found him standing alone at Hannah’s grave in the pitch black of night on the day of her burial, he did his best to coax him to come and stay with him for a few days.

“Cian, please.  We just want to help you.  Tell me what we can do.”

He raised his eyes to his long-time friend, eyes that were vacant of any emotion.  Looking back at the gravestone he mumbled a few words that Reynolds didn’t catch.

“What?  I didn’t hear you.  What did you say?”

“May 23rd,” he voiced the day Hannah had died.  Reynolds had a fleeting moment where he truly thought Cian had lost his mind.

“May 23rd,” he repeated and then pinned John with a glare so fierce it nearly burned right through him. “You want to help, John?  Fine.  I have a plan.”

May 23rd. The day that the last good part of him died and the monster within was born; ready to seek vengeance for all that he’d lost.

Present Day

L
IFE AS AN intern at Lincoln Hospital was starting to become more of a routine for Athena.  Each day brought in new cases and opportunities to end up in surgery.  The six of them assigned to Webster were starting to become like a close-knit little family, even Dick was becoming more like a human being and less like a walking asshat.  She was closest with Sabine and Clarence, the three of them had formed a tight bond that she now cherished.  Bianca was hard to read at times, she could be warm and fuzzy one minute and completely cold and closed off the next.  Oscar was still his shy self, but each day he made a little more progress on opening up.

Added responsibilities were being passed to them everyday and Athena was thrilled about it.  Each time she was paged to a patient’s room to assess a situation or prescribe a medication, in her eyes validated that she actually belonged there.  That she’d made it as a doctor and was on track to making her dreams a reality.

One Tuesday morning while she, Sabine and Clarence were in the teaching lab practicing their sutures, Sabine voiced the question that had been on all of their minds.

“So when do you think they’ll let us cut?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.  Her black hair was wrapped around her head in intricate braids that only she could pull off, giving her a soft yet sleek look.  Athena knew for a fact there was more than one doctor in the hospital that had his—and maybe even a few hers—eye on her.

“I think it’s gonna be today.  I feel it, something big is gonna happen today,” Clarence replied, nodding at them.

“I don’t know.  You think so?  What could possibly happen that would get us all into the OR today with scalpels in our hands?” Athena asked, wondering if he knew something they didn’t.