Chapter 54

Layla

Normally, the operating room was peace. Focus. Determination.

Right now, it felt like chaos. The beeping machines. The overlapping voices barking instructions, calling out numbers. Metal instruments clattering against metal trays.

And in the center of all the madness lay Aldo Marcello. Pale, unconscious, bleeding from a deep bullet wound in his side.

My fingers shook.

I stood over him, hands gloved. Sweat beading my brow despite the cool of the room. I’d done this a hundred times if I’d done it once. Saved more lives than I could remember with these two hands, this needle, this procedure.

I’d pulled people back from the brink of death.

But right now, when it mattered more than anything else in the world, my goddamned hands shook.

“BP’s dropping!” a nurse called, her shrill bark cutting through the chaos in my head.

Shit. This was Aldo. And I was losing him.

“Dr. Bennett!”

My heart lurched. I needed to stop being Layla and start being Dr. Bennett. Dottore Bennett.

Focus. I pulled a deep breath in through my nose, forced it out through my mouth. Stop thinking about Aldo. Stop seeing his face. Look at the wound, and he’s just another patient.

Blood spilled out under my fingers, bright crimson, a stark, vivid reminder of how precariously close he was to slipping away.

No.

I bent closer, shutting out all the rest.

Blood, wound, needle. Nothing else mattered. My hands stopped shaking. My breath evened. Heartbeat evened.

“Clamp!” I called, lifting a hand, and the instrument pressed against my palm. I didn’t look up from the wound. Didn’t need to.

The rest was instinct.

Work took over. My movements turned steady, swift.

“He’s crashing!” Someone shouted over the white-out calm of my focus. My heart ratcheted back up. Breath quickened. “We’re losing him.”

No!

My head snapped up towards the monitor. Aldo’s heart rate was plummeting, his measured lifeline taking an erratic course across the screen.

Without warning, it plunged.

Flatlined.

“No!” My voice cracked. “No! I won’t lose him! Start compressions.”

“But the wound—”

“I’m still working. Go!”

One of the nurses bent over to initiate CPR. I forced my mind back on that wound, my fingers around the needle. Determination flooded me in a hot wave. I wasn’t losing him.

“You’re not getting away this easy.” My voice was ragged, broken. “You’re not dying on me, Vasco. Not here. Not now. Not. Like. This.”

“We need to defib,” someone said, but I barely heard them over the pounding in my ears. “Layla!”

I stepped back as a nurse approached with the paddles. Aldo’s body arched up. The first nurse resumed CPR, and I picked my needle back up.

My hands worked. My eyes focused on the wound.

And my mouth moved of its own accord. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always leave me to clean up the mess?”

Tears blurred my vision, but I blinked them away before they could slow my hands—I needed those hands, that vision.

Words spilled out from my mouth in a low hum. Like background music, forcing me to focus. Forcing me to be here, now.

“You”—I tugged the needle—“you want me, you push me away. You want me again.”

The threat pulled tight in my fingers. I kept talking.

“You’re trying to protect me. You still love me. You want to send me away … And somehow, you want me to hold it all together. Keep moving forward. Living my life.

“I can’t keep up with it all anymore.” I choked on a sob. “And now, what, you’re going to die to leave me? I don’t fucking think so.”

“Clear!” The defibrillator paddles lifted, and I stepped back just long enough for the charge to arch through his body.

The heart monitor didn’t change.

“I’m not letting him die!” I snapped, and then I leaned closer to Aldo to hiss in his ear. “You always quit when it matters. You did it eight years ago, and you’re doing it again now. And I will never stop hating you for that.”

I straightened, my focus back on my work. Back on saving this man’s life. Because for all that he’d done to me, for all that he’d cost me, for all that he’d made me suffer, I still couldn't let him die.

I could save him.

I would.

“I hate that you keep making me hope,” I gritted through clenched teeth. “I hate that you make me love you, even when I know better.”

I pulled the final stitch and sat back to stare at my finished work. “I hate that I know you’ll just hurt me again—and still I can’t stop loving you. Can’t stop hoping.”

“Clear!” The machine screeched one more time, and the room fell suddenly silent save for the frantic hum of the monitors, the hiss of the ventilator.

“You left me,” I whispered in that fallen quiet. “And now you want to leave me again, is that it?”

Silence.

“Come on, damn you!” I shoved the CPR nurse out of the way to take over compressions. My hands pushed down on his ribcage. “You’re stronger than this. And I’m not letting you off the fucking hook this easy.”

I didn’t care what the nurses must be thinking. What they might be seeing or assuming. I wasn’t fucking letting him die.

“BP rising,” someone said off to my left, and sudden hope left me heady, weak.

“Come on,” I whispered. Begged. “Don’t give me false hope.”

My gaze shifted toward the monitor—just as a tiny blip creased that flat line. My own heart blipped.

Another tiny beat marred that line.

Another.

Another.

My heart soared. He had a pulse! Faint, slow, but there. Life. He was alive. I stepped back on wobbly, shaking legs. Exhaustion already tugged at my limbs.

A shaky breath escaped my lips as the rest of the world flooded suddenly back in.

There was an entire team of nurses, assistants, and staff that had watched me lose control. That had heard my embarrassing confessions.

I wanted to turn. Run. Maybe laugh it off as an act of desperation. Instead, I stepped up to his bedside and leaned over to stare into his unfairly handsome face.

Even pale, even hovering at death’s door, even behind the arch of an oxygen mask, he was beautiful.

“I meant every word I said,” I informed that angel’s face. Every person in the room must have heard it, too, but I was beyond caring. “Do you have any idea how much it hurts to love someone who keeps breaking your heart?”

Vaguely, I was aware of the other staff slipping from the room. “Do you know the pain of wanting so fucking badly to let someone go—and never being able to?”

My voice cracked, and I clenched my hands into tight fists. “I thought I’d finally managed to get over you. To move on. And then you crashed back in, and now I know I will never be able to walk away.”

And there it was. My deepest, darkest, most desperate truth. I loved Aldo Marcello—and I always would. I’d never stopped loving him.

And that was the curse of my existence: That no matter where I went, no matter how hard I tried, I could never let him go. Like a ghost, he would haunt me until the day I died.

“I love you, Aldo,” I murmured through a haze of tears. “And I think I always will.”