Please Don't Die, Alpha! I Can Heal You Every Night novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Deposit
At 2 a.m. Sabine needs $140,000 by Friday for her father's heart surgery, and the bleeding gang boss in her ambulance bay names his price for her silence: yes.
At two in the morning, the woman at the finance desk slid a paper across to me.
It had my father's name on top and a number at the bottom.
$140,000.
"That's the deposit for the bypass," she said. "We need it by Friday at noon."
"It's Tuesday night," I said.
"I know."
"He could have another attack before Friday."
"I know that too, Ms. Hallett." She looked tired and sorry, which was worse than cold. "I don't set the policy."
I'm an ER nurse at Mercy General.
I have stood in this building for four years watching families sign forms like this one.
I never thought I would be the family.
My father was upstairs on a monitor, joking with the cardiac nurse about the Browns.
Glenn Hallett drove a truck for thirty-one years, and his company folded in March and took his insurance with it.
Two arteries were blocked, and the doctor said the third was close.
I had eleven hundred dollars in the bank.
Bree found me in the supply hall ten minutes later.
She pressed nine hundred and forty dollars into my hand, mostly in ones.
"It's the tip jar from the pizza night," she said. "And my Browns jacket money. I'll sell the jacket."
"Don't sell the jacket."
"Sabe, I will sell my kidney."
"Bree, you need your kidney."
She laughed, and then she cried, and I held her while she did it.
I had called the bank twice, and a credit union once.
Every one of them said the same sentence in a different voice.
I was in the ambulance bay at half past two, breathing cold air, when the black SUV pulled in too fast.
The back door opened before it stopped.
A bald man in round glasses got out, hauling someone with both arms.
The someone was enormous.
He wore a black wool coat, and the front of it was soaked through.
I knew the white-blond hair before I saw the face.
I knew the scar through his left eyebrow.
Eighteen months ago, this man had carried a bleeding boy into my ER and told me no police.
I had saved the boy.
Then I had filed the report anyway.
"Nurse," the bald man said. "Please. Merritt Crowe's boys hit us on the Flats, and he won't go through the front."
"Jude Kane doesn't go through anybody's front," I said.
I had read that name in the paper more than once.
The big man lifted his head.
Pale grey eyes found me and held.
"Hallett," he said.
My name tag was under my coat.
He couldn't have read it.
"You remember me," I said.
"You filed the report."
"I did."
"You still saved him." His voice was rough and quiet. "I've been wondering about that for a year and a half."
Blood dripped from the hem of his coat onto the concrete.
It wasn't one wound, I thought.
It was an old wound opened up again.
"Inside, there's a trauma bay," I said. "Doctors, a chart, a police call. That's the law."
"No."
"Then I can't help you."
"Doc," the bald man said, "he'll bleed out in the car."
I looked at the man holding him up.
I looked at the blood.
And I thought about a woman at a desk saying, I don't set the policy.
"I'll do it in the supply room," I said. "No chart. No call. But it's not free."
The big man didn't blink.
"Name it."
"A hundred and forty thousand dollars. By Friday at noon. Paid to Mercy General on my father's account."
The bald man made a sound.
The big man looked at me for a long moment.
I have never been looked at before.
It was not the way a man looks at a price.
It was the way a man reads a diagnosis.
"Done," he said.
"Just like that?"
"You said it like you meant it."
"I do."
"Then it's done." He swayed and caught himself on the bald man's shoulder. "Now sew me up, Sabine Hallett."
I worked on him for forty minutes behind a locked door, with Bree guarding the hall and lying to the charge nurse.
He didn't make a sound the entire time.
When the bleeding finally stopped, I washed my hands.
I told myself it was a strange night and I'd never see him again.
I went home at seven and slept two hours.
At nine, I called the finance desk because I couldn't stop myself.
The woman put me on hold.
When she came back her voice had changed.
"Ms. Hallett, the deposit was paid in full at eight-fifteen. Wire transfer. The surgery is scheduled for Tuesday."
I sat down on my kitchen floor.
"Who paid it?"
"The name on the transfer is a Mr. Kane."
Someone knocked on my door.
Three slow knocks.
I opened it on the chain.
The bald man in the round glasses stood in my hall, holding a folder against his chest.
"Morning, Doc," he said. "Ollie Buchanan. I drive for Mr. Kane."
"He'd like a word. He says you'll want to read the rest."
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