From Scapegoat to Donna novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Her Badge in the Dead Woman's Fist

The Don lives, but the blood bank technician who released the blood is found dead with Adriana's badge in her hand. The council wants her hanged, and Tancredi claims her for his own house.

Marta Valenti hung the fresh blood with her own hands.

She was the scrub nurse who had stood at my left elbow for four years, and she did not look at the gallery once.

"Pressure's coming up, Doctor," she said.

"Keep it coming."

The bullet had gone through the Don's lower lung and stopped against his spine.

It had torn a vein behind the liver on the way, and the vein was the real problem.

Blood filled the field faster than the suction could take it.

Last time I had never reached this part, because by now he had already been gone.

"Clamp," I said.

Marta put it in my palm before I finished the word.

I found the tear with two fingers and pinched it shut.

"Four-oh Prolene. Slow and small."

My hands knew what to do even while the rest of me shook.

I stitched the vein, then the lung, then I pulled the bullet out with forceps and dropped it into a steel dish.

It rang against the metal.

Behind the glass, nobody in the family said a word.

"Pressure is one-ten over seventy," Marta said. "He's holding."

I looked up at the gallery for the first time in two hours.

Ignazio was gone.

Bianca stood at the glass with her braid over one shoulder, and she raised her hand to me in a small, proud wave.

I waved back.

Her hand had been in my arm that morning, and the tape had been on her bag.

I closed the Don's chest and handed him to the ICU team alive.

I peeled off my gloves in the scrub room, and my wrists were shaking now that nobody needed them steady.

Tancredi was leaning on the doorframe with his arms folded.

"He's alive," I said.

"I heard."

"You heard? You were on the floor the whole time."

"I was."

He did not move out of the doorway.

"Dottoressa, the council wants you upstairs."

The board room on the fourth floor had a long walnut table and a dozen men around it.

Ignazio sat at the head, in his brother's chair.

On the table in front of him lay a hospital badge in a plastic evidence bag.

It was mine.

"The blood bank technician was found in the cold room an hour ago," Ignazio said. "Her throat was cut. This was in her fist."

My stomach turned over.

Last time it had been the same badge, the same technician and the same table.

Last time I had stood here in my scrubs with no idea what was coming, and said the stupid thing: I don't understand.

"Did she release the bag?" I asked.

"She did."

"Then she's the only person who can tell us what was in it." I kept my voice level. "And somebody made sure she can't."

"Somebody," Ignazio repeated. "You."

"What time did she die?"

He looked at the man on his right. The man shrugged.

"The medical examiner puts it at seven this morning," the man said. "Maybe a little after."

I almost smiled.

"At seven this morning I was scrubbed in over the Don on the table, with a nurse on my left and your entire family watching me through a window," I said. "Count the faces in that gallery. Every one of them saw me."

Nobody spoke.

A man near the end of the table coughed into his fist.

"She ordered it," Ignazio said smoothly. "A surgeon doesn't need her own hands to kill. She paid someone. Her father's debts are well known."

That was new. Last time he had not had to reach this far.

"My father has been dead six years," I said.

"And left you owing the family a great deal."

The whole table looked at me.

I understood then that the evidence had never been the point.

Ignazio had decided before I walked in that someone had to die for the Don's blood, and I was cheaper than anyone else in the room.

"The council can vote," he said. "The family doesn't tolerate a woman who tampers with its Don."

"I'm the one who saved him."

"After you poisoned him."

"Then why would I hang a clean bag?"

He didn't answer that.

Hands began to rise around the table.

One. Three. Five.

I counted them, and I counted the doors.

Then a chair scraped, and Tancredi's voice came from the back of the room.

"She stays with me."

Every head turned.

He walked down the length of the table without hurrying, and he laid his hand flat on the bag with my badge in it.

"She's mine to judge," he said. "Under the old law the heir keeps whoever is accused of touching his father."

"Tancredi," Ignazio said, very gently. "You don't mean that."

"I mean it, Uncle. She comes to my house tonight."

He looked down at me.

"Don't say anything," he said, low, so that only I could hear.

His fingers closed around my wrist, careful and cold, and he drew me out of the chair.

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