Chapter 82 - Code Red in the St. Jude Bunker
The reinforced steel doors of the underground surgical wing at St. Jude’s Private Pavilion slammed open with the force of a battering ram.
Dr. Alan Thorne, Ethan’s most trusted physician—a man whose career had been funded secretly through Sterling family trusts—met them in the sterile hallway surrounded by a six-person trauma unit.
"Ethan! Get her onto the gurney, now!" Thorne shouted, not wasting a breath on questions.
Ethan laid Olivia down gently, his hands trembling as he peeled his fingers from hers. Her white skin was drenched in cold sweat; her pulse was a thready, erratic flutter at the side of her neck.
"Placental abruption," Thorne barked, his hands already tearing away the blood-soaked fabric of her dress while the nurses hooked monitors to her chest and slipped IV lines into both arms. "Blood pressure is eighty over forty-five. She’s hemorrhaging internally. Fetal heart rate is decelerating—it's down to ninety! We have less than eight minutes before catastrophic fetal hypoxia!"
"Save them," Ethan pleaded, grabbing Thorne’s scrub top, his knuckles turning pure bone-white. The billionaire who had brought down Manhattan's most ruthless tycoons was reduced to an unmoored boy standing on the edge of an abyss. "Take whatever blood, whatever tissue, whatever organs you need from me. Just do not let them die."
"Step back, Ethan!" Thorne commanded, his eyes fierce behind surgical goggles. "Prep the OR for an emergency crash C-section! Push four units of O-negative and prep the neonatal incubator! Move, move, move!"
The red automatic doors hissed shut, locking Ethan out. The frosted glass instantly turned opaque, cutting off his sight of the woman who held his soul.
Ethan stumbled back against the corridor wall, sliding down the cold tile until his knees hit the linoleum. His hands were covered in Olivia’s blood. It was warm, metallic, and terrifyingly real.
The heavy exterior security door hissed open. Marcus walked in, limping heavily. His left shoulder was grazed, blood soaking through the dark fabric of his tactical sweater, but his eyes were sharp, scanning every corner of the hallway before locking onto Ethan.
"The team behind us?" Ethan asked, his voice dead, devoid of all inflection.
"Three down in the tunnel. The rest broke off when we hit the public street," Marcus said, breathing hard as he popped a fresh magazine into his sidearm. "They weren't local hitmen, Ethan. They carried silenced MPX carbines with hollow-point rounds, ceramic body armor with no serial numbers, and encrypted comms on a private NATO auxiliary band. These are the Sovereign Council’s apex cleanup crew."
Ethan looked down at his bloodstained hands, then slowly raised his head. "And the call? The satellite signal?"
Marcus pulled out his phone, placing it on the stainless steel bench between them. "I ran the source through the cipher key Charles gave you ten years ago before his supposed cardiac arrest. It cleared the seventy-two-character authentication."
"Charles is dead," Ethan whispered, the words tasting like poison. "I stood at his open casket. I watched them lower him into the vault at Trinity Church."
"You saw an embalmed body after a closed-room autopsy performed by Dr. Julian Vance," Marcus countered quietly, leaning in close. "And Vance disappeared to South America three days after the funeral. Ethan... the signal wasn't rerouted through a server farm. It originated from a localized transponder less than fifteen miles from here."
Ethan’s eyes widened. "He’s in New York."
Before Marcus could answer, the red light above the operating room door began flashing violently, accompanied by a piercing, continuous alarm.
A nurse burst through the doors, her mask spattered with crimson, her eyes wide with sheer panic.
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"Dr. Thorne needs Mr. Sterling inside right now!" she screamed. "The mother’s heart has stopped!"
***
