Page 2 of Heartbeats Amidst Chaos: Part 1

Her thoughts cut off abruptly as a hand closed like a vice around her wrist. She looked down to find the patient’s eyes focused on hers with laser intensity, despite the obvious agony contorting his face. They were hazel, their depths fractured with pain and desperation.

“I didn’t do it,” he said clearly. Then, his eyes rolled upward and his hand fell from her wrist, the handcuffs clinking in the sudden quiet.

Chapter two

Elio swam back to consciousness and immediately wished he could pass out again.

Pain stabbed through his ribs, burning across his abdomen and screaming from so many places on his body that he couldn’t keep track of where it was coming from. And his head—it felt like someone stabbed a crowbar straight through his skull and into his brain, twisting it now and then for good measure.

A moan escaped his lips as he fought to breathe and not panic.

“Hey,” a soft voice said, cutting through the fog of torture like a clear, silver note of music through static. “Stay with me a minute. Stay with me.”

Elio opened his eyes, finding it difficult to focus on the face that hovered above his own. It was a perfect face.The face ofan angel, he thought. Not like the angels depicted in storybooks or cathedrals, but as he had always pictured them. Sharp, even features; a slender, graceful neck that disappeared all too quickly behind the modest neckline of her clothing; endlessly blue eyes that appeared as if they could see right through a person. His angel even seemed to be wearing a halo, but that could just be the lights which were white and blinding.

The pain, which had faded to the background for a bare fraction of a second, clawed through him with new ferocity. Elio tried to reach up and grab where it felt like his side was being flayed open. His hand moved a scant two inches before it jerked to a halt. With a grunt of panic, he tried to sit up, realizing both of his hands were secured with handcuffs to the bed he lay on.

Alarm rang through him, along with flashes of memory.

The American Cancer Society concert. Rushing down the stairs after someone he thought he recognized—and then, the explosion. The screams and chaos. The tearing pain and the flashing in and out of consciousness. It was all a horrifying muddle in his head.

A hand was on his chest, settling above the searing pain, gently pushing him down.

“Can you tell me your name?” his angel asked. “Do you know where you are?”

Other voices broke in, speaking over her.

“Elio Accardi,” a man’s gravelly voice demanded. “Did you plant that bomb? Tell us who you were working with.”

And then a woman—a different woman, with a harsh, angry tone, “Will there be another bomb? Accardi, we need you to answer our questions.” A hand jostled his shoulder, and torment splintered through him from that part of his body as well. Elio groaned.

“That’s enough!” snapped the clear, silver voice. “I’m sure you’re violating some sort of right by questioning him before he has received treatment. He needs pain medications immediately, stitches, and a CT scan, at the very least.”

Elio squinted into the light again, slowly starting to make out the shapes of the people surrounding him. Police officers, two detectives in suits, and a doctor. The latter was tall, nearly the same height as the men in the room, and slim, her figure obscured by a longish white coat and scrubs.

She gestured adamantly toward the door. “Anyone who is not required by law to be in here . . . out.”

There were immediate rejoinders.

“We need to know if there’s another bomb or bomber,” the female detective insisted. One of the cops sneered, “Don’t waste a CT scan on him.” The doctor rounded on the cop.

“At this point, he is merely a suspect. Am I correct?”

“Well, yes—”

“Then he is innocent until proven guilty,” she snapped. “And per constitutional law, he is entitled to medical care either way. As for asking him questions, he won’t be able to give you a clear answer until his pain is under control anyway. So. Step. Outside.”

The doctor enunciated each word clearly, once again pointing toward the door. Glowering, the inhabitants of the room shuffled toward the door, and all but one police officer left the room. The singular cop took up a position against the wall beside the door. A guard.

Elio’s head was spinning too fast and throbbing too painfully for him to fully sort out how much trouble he was actually in. Suffice it to say—he was in deep. That much was painfully clear.

Also clear was the fact that the beautiful doctor who bent over him was currently his savior, his angel. As the only medical professional in the room, she moved swiftly and decisively. Elio noted that she took up the roles of both nurse and doctor. Her fingers were cool against his arm, and her hands moved with practiced precision, swabbing his skin with an alcohol pad, inserting an IV needle and taping it into place, and then drawing something from a tiny glass bottle into a syringe and injecting it into the IV bag.

Elio drank her in, attempting to shut out the clamoring of his pain receptors by focusing on the slightest squint of her blue eyes as she eyeballed the syringe; the slow drop of her thick, darkeyelashes as she blinked; the way he could see her pulse in the soft, creamy dip at the base of her throat.

She turned toward him, sitting on the stool next to his bed, and met his eyes again for the first time since the others had left the room.

“I need to determine how bad your head injury is,” she said slowly. “Can you answer a few questions to help me out?”

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