Chapter 3 - NO ONE BELONGS TO YOU
By sunrise, Dante had placed two guards outside the clinic and Camila had ordered both of them to stand across the street. She would accept protection from a distance. She would not let armed men turn a neighborhood medical practice into an occupied building.
Dante returned at nine with a certified check for $11,300—the precise unpaid balance—and a written acknowledgment that it purchased no future service. Camila examined the check twice before handing it to Elena Ruiz, the clinic’s nurse and administrator.
Elena was forty-five, compact, observant, and unimpressed by expensive suits.
“Is this legal money?” she asked.
“It came from Lombra’s operating account,” Dante said. “Restaurant revenue. My attorney documented it.”
Elena looked at Camila. “I asked him.”
Camila almost smiled.
Dante did not.
The morning clinic continued around him. An uninsured construction worker received stitches. A retired teacher had her blood-pressure medication adjusted. Marisol Morales arrived with her daughter, Sofia, after her estranged husband violated a protective order.
While Camila examined the bruising on Marisol’s shoulder, Sofia sat beneath the reception desk coloring a dragon with purple wings.
Dante noticed the child’s broken backpack zipper and the way she flinched whenever a man’s voice rose outside.
He lowered his voice for the rest of the morning.
When Camila emerged from the examination room, she found him kneeling several feet from Sofia, repairing the zipper with a small multitool Leo had given him. He did not touch the backpack until the child nodded permission.
“Done,” Dante said, placing it on the floor between them.
Sofia inspected his work. “Are you a mechanic?”
Camila covered a cough.
Dante looked toward her with deep suspicion. “Apparently.”
That brief humor disappeared when a courier arrived carrying two sealed cartons of anesthetic and emergency medication. The invoice listed Lakeshore Medical Logistics, although Camila had ordered nothing from the company.
She stopped Elena before the cartons entered storage.
The manufacturer’s lot numbers did not match the tamper seals. One vial bore a clear label, but the liquid contained a faint yellow cast that the genuine medication did not.
“Put them down,” Camila ordered.
The courier looked toward the exit.
Dante moved between him and the door without touching him. “Who sent you?”
“I just drive.”
“Then you know where you collected the boxes.”
The courier dropped his electronic scanner and ran through the rear hall. Leo pursued him, but a delivery van was already waiting in the alley. It struck a garbage container while accelerating away, leaving behind a broken piece of blue-and-silver body panel bearing the Lakeshore wave.
Camila locked the cartons in an unused cabinet and called Detective Lim.
“If Elena had shelved these, we might not have noticed until a patient stopped breathing.”
Dante’s jaw flexed. “Victor recommended acquiring Lakeshore because it gave us access to the medical import market.”
“For legitimate products?”
“That was the condition.”
“Your condition didn’t protect anyone.”
“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”
The admission surprised her more than an argument would have.
Lim arranged for the cartons to be collected under warrant. Preliminary field testing could not identify the substitute, but the seals carried the same internal routing code used on several shipments moving through Costa-controlled warehouses.
Dante wanted Camila relocated to one of his guarded properties until Paolo was found.
She refused.
“You don’t understand what Victor will do if he thinks you can identify him.”
“I understand perfectly. What you don’t understand is that Marisol won’t enter a mansion guarded by men with rifles. Sofia won’t either. Neither will half my patients.”
“You can’t protect them from Victor.”
“Neither did you.”
The words struck. Dante’s expression cooled, but he did not retaliate.
Camila stepped closer.
“If we work together, these are my terms. Seven days. I review Paolo’s evidence and help find him. My patients remain civilians. No weapons enter this clinic. I decide what treatment is medically necessary, and I report every new gunshot wound. You don’t threaten my staff, interfere with my decisions, or tell me whom I may treat.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed. “And the exclusivity?”
“No.”
“Camila—”
“No one belongs to you.”
For several seconds, the only sound came from Sofia’s crayons moving across paper.
Dante finally extended his hand. “Seven days.”
Camila shook it. “And if you grab my wrist again, I’ll break your thumb.”
His mouth shifted. “That would be difficult.”
“I’m a surgeon. I know where the joint fails.”
This time, Dante almost laughed.
The first shot shattered the clinic’s front window.
Dante moved before the sound finished. He drove Camila behind the reception wall and covered Sofia with his own body as Leo dragged Marisol into the examination corridor. Two more rounds tore through the blinds, scattering glass across the floor.
Then the gunfire stopped.
Dante lifted his head. Blood darkened the shoulder of his charcoal jacket.
Camila stared at it.
May you like
He followed her gaze and gave her a grim, humorless smile.
“The next man bleeding across your linoleum,” he said, “appears to be me.”
