Chapter 3 - The Price of Healing
Roderick did not lower his gun, but he stepped through the balcony doors, his heavy dress shoes striking the hardwood floor with a dull, hollow thud.
The lace curtains rustled violently as the wind blew rain into the room behind him.
Beckett Hume gasped, dropping the metal tray he was holding. It hit the floor with a loud, metallic clatter that echoed through the small house. The young Vannucci boy on the stool reached instinctively for a knife on the table beside him, but Adriana’s hand slammed down on his wrist, holding him back.
She didn't jump. She didn't scream.
Slowly, Adriana wiped her bloody hands on a clean towel, set her needle down in a tray of antiseptic, and turned to face him.
She looked at Roderick standing in the dim light, dripping wet, holding a cold black pistol pointed toward the floor. Her gray eyes were tired—so tired they looked almost silver—but there was no surprise in them.
“You followed me,” she said softly. Her voice wasn't defensive. It was just a simple statement of fact.
Roderick looked at her, his mind struggling to bridge the gap between the lie he had prepared himself for and the reality standing before him.
“Who are these people, Adriana?” he asked, his voice raspy, vibrating with an emotion he couldn't control.
Beckett Hume took a brave step forward, placing himself slightly in front of Adriana. “Mr. Sabatini, please—this isn't what you think—”
“Quiet, Beckett,” Adriana said gently, touching the doctor's shoulder. She turned back to Roderick. “These are the men your world discards, Roderick.”
Roderick’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Adriana walked toward him, stopping just three feet away. She didn't look at the gun in his hand. She looked directly into his eyes—the same calm, unyielding stare she had given him the first day she walked into his therapy room.
“When a man gets shot in your world, Roderick, what happens to him if he isn't a boss?” she asked quietly. “If he’s just a twenty-year-old soldier from the Ninth Ward who took a bullet for a Vannucci capo? Or an old longshoreman who crushed his foot on your docks?”
Roderick didn't answer. He knew the answer. In their world, if you couldn't go to a public hospital because the police would arrest you, and you weren't important enough for the family boss to pay a private doctor, you went into a back alley and died.
“If they go to Charity Hospital, the police log the gunshot wound, and they spend twenty years in Angola prison,” Adriana continued, her voice rising slightly with an old, deep-seated passion. “If they stay in their homes, they die of gangrene in two days. So Beckett and I come here. Three nights a week. Every week.”
Roderick glanced at Beckett Hume. “Who is he?”
“Dr. Beckett Hume,” Adriana said. “He was the chief of trauma at Ochsner until he refused to let a high-ranking politician’s son jump the queue for a liver transplant. They ruined his license. He has nowhere else to practice.”
She took another step closer to Roderick, reaching out her blood-stained hand, stopping just short of touching his wet jacket.
“Every night, I go to see a different man, Roderick,” she whispered, tears finally welling up in her gray eyes. “Because every night, another mother’s son is bleeding out in a dark room because of the wars you and the Vannuccis fight over those damn docks.”
The silence in the room felt heavier than the rain outside.
On the cots, the wounded men watched Roderick with quiet, defensive terror. They knew who he was. They knew his name. To them, Roderick Sabatini was the myth that lived in the big mansion in the Garden District—the man whose orders decided whether their neighborhoods had peace or fire.
Roderick slowly, methodically engaged the safety on his Colt .45 and holstered it beneath his jacket.
He looked down at his own hands—hands that had ordered hits, signed land seizures, and carved out an empire from the mud of the Mississippi. Then he looked at Adriana’s hands—stained with iodine and blood, calloused from stitching together the flesh he and his rivals kept breaking.
“Why didn't you tell me?” Roderick asked, his voice barely audible above the roar of the storm outside. “Why did you keep this from me?”
Adriana looked away, a tear slipping down her pale cheek, leaving a clean track through the faint dust on her skin.
“Because I knew what you would do,” she whispered.
Roderick’s jaw tightened. “What would I have done?”
“You would have paid for everything,” she said, looking back at him with fierce, sorrowful intensity. “You would have bought the best equipment, hired five surgeons, turned this into a proper medical facility... and then you would have turned it into a Sabatini operation. You would have used it as leverage over the Vannuccis. You would have made these boys swear loyalty to your name before we patched their guts.”
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She shook her head softly.
“I needed one place in my life, Roderick... just one place where mercy didn't come with an invoice signed by a Sabatini.”
