Page 35 of The Final Contract (The Black Ledger Billionaires #5)

FIVE YEARS AGO

T he smell of burnt coffee and disinfectant clings to everything, even the cafeteria. Stasia and I sit side by side at one of the corner tables, both still in scrubs, both half-slumped from another night shift that doesn’t seem to end.

Aurora’s picture lights up her phone screen when she sets it down, and Stasia smiles like she can’t help it.

“She’s saying new words every day now,” she says around a bite of her sandwich. “And we’re gonna try potty training soon. Wish her auntie Sera was around more to see it.”

There it is. The guilt trip. She doesn’t even bother to make it subtle.

I pick at my salad, stabbing a tomato harder than necessary. “I’m trying, Stas. Between this and the Ledger?—”

“You can’t keep running yourself ragged.” She gives me that big-sister look, even though we’re the same age. “You’ve been doing two jobs for how long now?”

I sigh, pushing my food away. “Long enough that I feel like I’m about to burn out. Some days I don’t even know why I’m still here. The money over there is unreal.”

I keep my voice low, though the cafeteria is mostly empty. “Yeah. They’ve asked me to consider going full-time.”

“And?”

I shrug, but my chest feels tight. “I don’t know. It’s a totally different world over there. Glamorous, excess is everywhere, but…”

“But it’s not this,” she finishes softly, glancing toward the doors that lead back into the ER. “You’re a damn good nurse, Sera. You’d be missed. And I think you would miss this too.”

Before I can answer, the intercom crackles overhead, sharp enough to cut through the hum of fluorescent lights.

“Attention ER staff. Incoming ambulance, ETA five minutes. Three patients from motor-vehicle collision. One critical, two stable. Trauma team to Bay Two. Repeat—three patients incoming, one critical. Trauma team to Bay Two.”

The room stills for half a beat. Stasia and I lock eyes.

Break’s over.

We’re already moving, tossing our trash, scrubbing sanitizer into our hands as we rush for the doors. My stomach knots, half from the food I barely touched, half from the dread that always coils before we see what the night is about to throw at us.

The sliding doors burst open, and chaos comes with them.

Stasia’s already moving toward Trauma Two, where the critical will land. The staff surges forward as the first ambulance screeches up. They sprint beside the stretcher, barking questions, absorbing the medic’s rapid-fire updates.

I catch only a glimpse as they disappear down the corridor—blood, mangled limbs, a face so destroyed it’s barely human. My gut twists. I know the team will fight, will bleed themselves dry for her, but the truth presses hard in my chest. We’re losing one tonight.

The second ambulance arrives right behind. This time, the patient is stable. A man. Middle-aged. His arm in a crooked splint, his face slack with alcohol and unconsciousness.

Of course. Figures.

The drunk who made the selfish choice… walks away with a broken arm. While a woman in a different bay fights for her life.

He’s wheeled past me, met by a couple of staff who take him down a different hall. I swallow hard, bile creeping up my throat.

The third ambulance rolls in, siren fading, lights still strobing red and blue across the glass doors. The stretcher jolts as it’s rushed inside, and I fall in step.

“Severe head trauma,” the medic shouts. “Stable vitals, but disoriented.”

The man is babbling, voice cracked and desperate. “Where is my fiancée? Where is she?”

The medic tries to keep him calm, but it’s useless—he’s thrashing, eyes wide with panic.

I grab a chart from the desk and step into his path. “I’ll take him,” I tell the charge nurse, and she nods, already dispatching another nurse toward Stasia’s trauma.

We push the stretcher into a curtained bay, and I close it behind us.

“His name is Caleb,” the medic mutters before he hurries out. “That’s all we could get.”

I move to his side, reaching for gloves. “I’m Seraphina,” I say gently. “Do you know where you are, Caleb?”

He stares at me, confusion and blood clouding his expression. His hand shoots out, clutching me with terrifying strength.

“Sarah?”

His voice cracks, desperate, and before I can stop him, he’s pulling me against him, sobbing into my shoulder.

“Sarah, thank God, I was so worried?—”

I peel him back, forcing him down, my heart hammering. “No. My name is Seraphina. You were in an accident. You’re at the hospital. If you can remain still?—”

But he won’t. He sits upright, refusing the bed, refusing the pillow. His head wound is grotesque—split wide from temple down the left side of his face, blood running so freely it soaks his collar.

He’s probably going to lose that eye. He’ll lose vision in it, at a minimum.

He’s wearing a tux. “Where were you going tonight, Caleb?” I ask, trying to see if he can remember. Also trying to calm him so we can do our job.

In his hand, gripped like salvation, is a white rose. A boutonniere, maybe.

Only now it drips scarlet with every drop from his wound. The petals stained red, one by one.

“Sarah,” he whispers again, kissing the flower with reverence. “Don’t leave me.”

My throat tightens, but I steady my voice. “I’m not leaving you. Call me Seraphina. We need to give you something to help, to calm you?—”

He cuts me off, eyes glassy, wet. “Sarah Christina.” He says it like a prayer. Like devotion. “I was going to propose.”

Something twists painfully in my chest. I feel for him, I do. But we need to treat him, and he won’t lie down.

He fixes me with a look that burns through the haze of blood loss. “You would have said yes, wouldn’t you?”

The intercom explodes overhead, pulling the breath from my lungs:

“Code Blue, Trauma Two. All available staff to Trauma Two, immediately. Code Blue, Trauma Two.”

That’s Stasia’s patient. The critical.

I jump up so fast the curtain rattles. “Prep him for sedation,” I bark to the nurse sliding in behind me, already rattling through orders as I sprint for the doors.

“Sarah!” His voice cuts after me, ragged.

But I don’t look back.

“Sarah Christina!” He screams it this time, the words splitting with desperation as I push through the doors and vanish into the chaos of Trauma Two.

T he doors slam open, and the room is already a storm.

Monitors shriek. Gloves snap. Voices collide in a rush of orders—IV, O2, epi, suction. Someone’s counting vitals, another shouting for blood, another pushing a crash cart closer. The air reeks of antiseptic, iron, and sweat.

And in the center of it, she lies on the table.

Blonde hair matted dark, drenched with blood. So much of it I can’t tell where the wounds end and her face begins.

“Get on compressions!” the attending barks, sharp and fast.

“Starting compressions!” I shout, already moving.

I slide into place, pushing past a nurse withdrawing bloody gauze. My palms slam down, hard and fast, over the sternum. Count—one, two, three, four—my arms locked, shoulders screaming as I drive her chest down an inch and a half at a time.

Across from me, Stasia works with laser focus. She’s at the head of the bed, securing the airway, her voice tight as she calls for suction and adjusts the laryngoscope. Her brow is furrowed, sweat dripping down her temple, but her hands are steady. She doesn’t see me staring at the patient’s face.

Through the blood, through the gashes ripped open across her skin—I see us.

Stasia. Me.

The resemblance is gutting, but there’s no time to freeze.

“Bag her!” Stasia shouts, and another nurse squeezes the valve, forcing air into blood-filled lungs.

The monitor wails. Asystole. Flat.

“Epi in,” someone calls.

The syringe goes in. A fresh nurse takes over compressions, and I stagger back, breath tearing through me, my gloves slick with blood.

She looks like us. God, she looks just like us.

“Pulse check!”

Hands press against the neck, the groin. Silence. Nothing.

“No pulse.”

“Resume compressions,” the attending orders, but the words drag this time, heavy with doubt.

“I’ve got it,” I say, and I’m already back on the chest. My palms drive into her sternum, rhythm sharp, almost frantic. Sweat drips down my temple, stinging my eyes.

“Push one of atropine.”

The syringes empty, but the monitor doesn’t move. That awful flatline screams at us, unbroken, unrelenting.

“She’s been down thirty minutes,” a nurse murmurs, voice subdued.

“We’re losing her,” another says, softer still.

The attending nods grimly. “Another two minutes, then we call.”

But I can’t stop.

My arms keep pumping, harder, faster, my breath tearing through me. Her blonde hair is plastered to her face, streaked in blood, but I can see her through it—see Stasia.

So much like Stasia.

I slam down again and again, refusing to stop, refusing to let her go.

“Seraphina,” someone says. A warning.

I don’t hear them.

It’s my sister’s face. It’s mine. God, it could be her.

“Seraphina.”

This time it’s closer. A hand closes over my wrist, firm but gentle. I look up through my haze, and it’s Stasia standing across the table, her eyes brimming but steady.

Her voice softens. “That’s enough.”

My arms falter. My gaze drops to the woman beneath me—the blood, the broken body, the slack jaw. My chest heaves, and only now do I feel the wet streaks on my cheeks.

I look back up at Stasia, and she’s crying too.

The attending clears his throat. His voice is low. “Time of death, 03:27.”

The words cut the room into silence. One by one, the staff step back, gloves snapping off, heads bowed. The storm dies.

And I’m left with blood on my hands, my heart splintered, and the image of my sister’s face on a woman we couldn’t save.

I scrub my hands raw in the sink, watching red swirl down the drain until the water runs clear. My arms are clean now, but the scrubs are ruined. Bloodstains splatter the fabric like some macabre painting. The smell of iron clings to me no matter how hard I breathe.

I press my back against the cold tile wall, sliding down, knees drawing up, and I let it out. The sobs. The kind you choke on, the kind that wrack through your chest and leave you empty.

“Hey.”

Stasia’s voice breaks through. She rounds the corner, and when she sees me—sees the state I’m in—her expression softens instantly.

“What happened back there?” she asks gently, crouching down beside me.

I shake my head, wiping at my face uselessly. “She looked like you, Stas. Like us. And I—” My throat tightens. “I couldn’t stop. I kept seeing you on that table. I couldn’t let her go.”

Stasia doesn’t say anything at first. She just sinks down onto the floor next to me and pulls me against her. Her arms are warm, steady, and I bury my face in her shoulder like I used to when we were kids.

“She wasn’t me,” she murmurs into my hair. “She wasn’t you either. We did everything we could.”

“I know,” I whisper, though the words feel like lies.

“We knew we weren’t going to win that one, Sera. But we tried like hell.”

We sit there, pressed together, the only stillness in a hospital that never stops moving.

The curtain whips back suddenly. A harried orderly pokes his head in. “Hey—where’s the patient with the head wound? Guy from the crash?”

Stasia and I both blink. I frown, pushing up onto shaky legs. “What do you mean? He was sedated. There’s no way he?—”

But when I cross the hall into the bay, the bed is empty. The monitors still beep, cords dangling loose. The floor is smeared with footprints, a trail of red leading nowhere.

And on the mattress, where he had been sitting, lies a single rose.

White. Blood-soaked.

I stare at it until my vision blurs again. Not because of him, not because of the strangeness of it being left behind, but because I know—deep down—I can’t do this anymore.

I can’t walk into a trauma room and the patient’s face becomes my sister’s.

Another night like this, and it’ll break me.