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Chapter One
Death was business as usual, and tonight, business was…good?
No, not good. More like unrelenting. Time didn’t really exist inside a place like Gage Memorial’s emergency room. Maybe that’s why death visited so frequently.
It was a stark, nearly windowless maze of beds and machines, sterilized extensively by bleach and four-foot ultraviolet light bulbs. But by ten hours into my shift, I navigated it instinctively, pausing at the nurse’s station to pull a new chart.
Haley, the charge nurse, passed me one. She was only a few years older than me, but she wore every one of them in the circles rimming her eyes. She tossed her box braids over one shoulder and peeked across as I skimmed the paperwork. “Pediatric blood draw and IV,” she informed me. “You have all the luck.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. Important but boring work. Not that I’d ever wish for something more exciting, exactly, but this late in my shift, I was starting to feel the hours. Sticking a kid wasn’t going to keep the adrenaline pumping. “Tell that to the kid in about five minutes.”
She tried to grin, but her lips flattened instead. “I just sent another overdose downstairs. That’s the third one this week.”
“Trinity?” I asked.
“What else would it be? I miss the old days when clover didn’t kill everyone,” she said with a sigh. “Fuck, I just miss being able to hit some myself.”
I bit back a frown. I’d learned my lesson about messing with shit like that the hard way. Now I just worried about kids like my brother, Channing, making a mistake that might cost them their lives.
“Times have changed,” I reminded her.
New Orleans’s favorite street drug, clover, had once been as harmless as the tequila shots slung on Bourbon Street, almost beloved for its ability to turn any night into the best one of your life—without the risk of addiction. But the criminal syndicate that ran New Orleans must not have been making enough money on it or were greedy and wanted more, so they altered the formula. In the last six months, clover had been responsible for nearly half of the overdoses in the entire city. We’d dubbed the new strain “trinity” because if someone went looking for the high of a four-leafed clover and got trinity instead, their luck would run out.
“I heard that we’re getting funding for more beds to help,” Haley said.
Like that was going to solve the problem. The worst part was that no one was doing anything about it—not when the criminals selling it bankrolled every institution in town, including this one.
“It’s something,” she added when she saw my face.
I couldn’t stop myself. “Or maybe someone needs to lock the monster selling it away.”
“Shhh. Don’t forget who pays the bills.”
“Paying a hospital to keep quiet doesn’t absolve sin.”
Haley’s face softened, and I braced myself for her usual apologetic gymnastics about making tough decisions for the greater good.
But all hell broke loose instead as a blur of blue scrubs rushed toward the entrance.
One caught my eye and shouted, “Full trauma coming in from first district—two males; gunshot wounds, one to left shoulder, one intracranial; estimated blood loss unknown.”
“Get this down to the lab,” I ordered an intern who looked a little too excited by the prospect of seeing actual gunshot victims.
He opened his mouth to protest, but the charge nurse cut him off with a stern, “Now.”
“Bourbon Street?” I shouted to the nurse who had taken the call.
He shook his head. “Waverly.”
The single word told me all I needed to know. If the shooting had occurred on Waverly Avenue, it wasn’t tourists caught in a drunken altercation. Tourists stuck to the well-worn, fabled streets of the French Quarter and its booze and beads. Waverly, farther south, was tucked next to the residential Warehouse District. Waverly’s bars and nightclubs served a rougher clientele, and if two victims were on their way, there was every likelihood more would follow. Even in my delinquent days, I’d avoided that neighborhood. Even now, no one I knew went down there. But for native New Orleanians, there was only one family’s name that struck fear deeper than Waverly.
Gage.
Maybe it was because Waverly could be avoided—and usually was—but for those of us stuck here, the Gages were synonymous with the city itself. Not just because their name was plastered on a dozen businesses scattered around the Big Easy, including the trauma center I was currently standing in, but because it ran through the very veins of the city and into its sinew and bone. The outside world knew us for the French Quarter and the Garden District, voodoo and jazz and food. Tourists were welcome; protected, even. But those of us living here knew the true darkness of the city. We felt it watching us. And the heart of that darkness was Lachlan Gage.
A man I’d never met, never even seen. And now I’d be cleaning up another one of his messes.
Haley’s muttered curse snapped me to attention.