Chapter 5: The Underground Purgatory
Clara’s eyes rolled back, slipping into the heavy, merciful darkness of unconsciousness before the scream could ever leave her throat. Her head lulled against the filthy pillow, her jaw slack, and the wet rattling in her chest slowed to a terrifying, inconsistent crawl.
“Clara! Look at me!” Dominic roared, shaking her fragile shoulders, but there was no response.
The heavy thud of Paulie’s footsteps echoed violently down the hallway. A second later, the massive enforcer filled the splintered doorway, gripping a black canvas medical bag in one hand and his weapon in the other. Paulie took one look at the squalid room, the defiant six-year-old, and his untouchable boss cradling a half-dead woman.
“Boss, what the hell is…” Paulie started, his face draining of all color as he recognized the sharp angles of Clara’s face beneath the soot and grime.
He had been there the night she supposedly disappeared. He had driven the car that chased hers onto the bridge.
“Not a word, Paulie,” Dominic cut him off, his tone laced with absolute zero temperature. “Not a single, goddamn word. Take the kid. We’re going to Doc Miller’s.”
“Dom, listen to me, if the Council finds out she’s alive—”
“I will personally sever the head of anyone on the Council who breathes her name!” Dominic snarled, rising to his feet and effortlessly lifting Clara into his arms. “Get the door.”
Paulie swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously as he nodded mechanically. He reached for the little girl, but Mia scrambled backward, pressing herself against the peeling wallpaper like a cornered stray dog.
“I’ll walk,” she spat, glaring at Paulie’s outstretched, scarred hand.
“Let her walk,” Dominic ordered, adjusting Clara’s weight against his cashmere coat. “Stay close to my coat, kid. If you run, I won’t chase you, and she dies right here.”
They moved down the stairwell in suffocating silence, the descent feeling infinitely longer than the climb. With every step, Clara’s fever burned against Dominic’s skin through the layers of their clothes, a terrifying reminder of the poison ravaging her organs.
Twenty minutes later, they were standing beneath the angry, buzzing fluorescent lights of Doc Miller’s underground clinic in Queens. The hidden facility smelled intensely of industrial bleach and rubbing alcohol, a sharp chemical sting that burned the inside of Dominic’s nostrils.
Miller, a disgraced former trauma surgeon with a severe gambling addiction and shaky hands, hadn’t asked questions when Dominic kicked the back door off its hinges. He had taken one look at Clara’s blue-tinged lips, shouted for his exhausted nurse, and wheeled her behind a heavy plastic curtain.
“She’s stable for now, pumping her full of broad-spectrum antibiotics,” Miller said, stepping out from behind the curtain forty minutes later, stripping off bloody latex gloves.
Dominic stood up instantly, the cracked vinyl waiting chair scraping loudly against the linoleum. “Fix her, Miller. I don’t care what it costs.”
“Dom, it’s bad,” Miller said, avoiding the mafia boss’s furious gaze. “I’m not talking about the pneumonia, though that’s severe enough to kill her given her weight. I’m talking about the underlying cause.”
“Speak plain English, Doc,” Paulie growled from the corner, his hand resting on his holster.
“She has severe heavy metal poisoning,” Miller whispered, his voice trembling. “Lead, sulfur, maybe something worse. Dom, I don’t know where she’s been hiding, but she’s dying from the inside out.”
“Flush her system,” Dominic commanded, stepping into the doctor’s personal space, his shadow swallowing the exhausted man. “Chelation therapy. Dialysis. I pay you enough to buy a wing at Mount Sinai, Miller. Do your job.”
“You’re not listening to me!” Miller pleaded, his scalp shining with nervous sweat. “This is chronic! Her kidneys are functioning at less than fifteen percent. The lead has calcified in her bones!”
“I don’t accept that,” Dominic whispered, his jaw locking so tightly he felt a sharp, shooting pain in his temples.
“She isn’t dying from a bullet wound, Dom!” Miller fired back, finding a brief second of courage. “Her body is systematically shutting down. I can pump her full of morphine so she doesn’t feel it, but I cannot rebuild her cellular structure!”
Dominic stared at the doctor, violently calculating the logistics of shooting the man in the kneecap just to feel some semblance of control. But before he could draw his weapon, a small, shuffling noise broke the heavy silence.
Mia had climbed down from her chair and walked straight past the men, stopping at the edge of the heavy plastic curtain. She didn’t cry; she just stared through the blurred plastic at the prone silhouette of her mother hooked to a web of IV tubes.
At this moment, Dominic realized his money and power were entirely useless against death. Have you ever felt utterly powerless to save someone you love?
“Paulie,” Dominic murmured, his voice dropping to a gravelly, defeated whisper.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“Call for the armored medical van. Right now,” Dominic ordered, his eyes never leaving his daughter. “We are moving her to the private trauma center in the estate’s basement. Tell the boys to load up every machine in this room into the back of that truck.”
“Dom, I have other patients—” Miller started to protest.
“Your clinic is closed permanently. You are coming with us,” Dominic interrupted, his voice dead and terrifyingly calm. “Pack her up. We leave for Long Island in ten minutes.”
