Chapter 11 - Thirty Grams of Antidote
The Persian rug soaked up the spilled champagne as Dominic’s weight pinned me against the cold oak parquet.
His fingernails tore into the front of my charcoal jacket, his knuckles turning chalky, his breathing reduced to a wet, agonizing rasp.
His gray eyes were rolling upward into the dark sockets, pupils dilating into black voids that no longer tracked the chandeliers.
“Clear the room!” Dante’s voice crashed through the library like thunder, stripping the panic from the air with raw military authority.
“Marcus, take the traitor alive! Do not put a hole in his skull!”
Marcus moved faster than a man his size had any right to move.
Before the elderly butler could bite down on the hollow molar in the back of his jaw, Marcus’s fist crashed into the side of the man’s mouth with the sound of snapping dry kindling.
Blood, saliva, and three shattered teeth sprayed across the velvet curtains.
Marcus drove his knee into the butler’s solar plexus, flattening him onto his stomach and pinning his neck to the floorboards with the sole of a combat boot.
“He’s got an emergency cyanide cap in the molar,” Marcus grunted, forcing a gloved thumb into the old man’s mouth to sweep out the crushed glass capsule before it could dissolve.
“He’s secure, Boss!”
“The Boss isn't hearing you!” I screamed, my voice shredding as I shoved my fingers into Dominic’s collar, tearing the cashmere sweater open down to the collarbone to give his windpipe space.
Dominic’s skin was ice-cold, mottled with dark plum patches where his peripheral blood flow was shutting down.
Potassium cyanide does not choke the throat; it poisons the mitochondria in every cell of the body, suffocating the blood from the inside out within three minutes.
Three minutes.
Two had already evaporated into the screams of sixty dock bosses scrambling for defensive positions.
“Dr. Rossi!” I yelled, leaning directly over Dominic’s face, slapping his cheek with enough force to leave a red handprint on his gray skin.
“Dominic, look at me!”
“Look at my eyes, damn it!”
His lids fluttered once, his jaw trembling violently, but his gaze drifted away into the ceiling moldings.
Dr. Rossi sprinted into the library from the basement staircase, his surgical mask still dangling around his neck, skidding on his knees beside the puddle of poisoned alcohol.
He jammed a stethoscope against Dominic’s chest for half a second before tossing it aside.
“Tachycardia turning into ventricular fibrillation,” Rossi stammered, his hands shaking as he opened his leather medical bag.
“I have epinephrine! I have atropine!”
“Epinephrine will stop his heart faster!” I roared, grabbing the doctor by the wrist with such ferocity that the man froze.
“It’s potassium cyanide! He swallowed it!”
“You need hydroxocobalamin!”
“Now!”
Rossi’s face turned gray.
“I... I have standard emergency kits in the surgical suite, but Cyanokit ampoules are specialized hospital reserves!”
“I don't stock concentrated hydroxocobalamin in the basement!”
My heart stopped.
The world shrank to the size of Dominic’s blue lips.
If the private surgical suite didn't have it, Dominic would be brain-dead before an ambulance could clear the police barricades on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Then, my mind clicked into the icy, forensic gear that had carried me through hundreds of medical research papers while sitting beside my mother’s hospital cot.
Every night for eight months, I had read toxicology journals to understand the chemical interactions of her chemotherapy and anti-rejection regimens.
“Sodium thiosulfate,” I said, my voice dropping into an unnatural, flat calm that silenced the entire circle of armed men around us.
Rossi blinked.
“What?”
“You have intravenous sodium thiosulfate in the surgical prep cabinet,” I demanded, leaning over the doctor until my nose nearly touched his.
“You use it to neutralize cisplatin chemotherapy burns during port-line flushes!”
“Tell me you have it, Roberto!”
Rossi’s eyes widened with sudden, electric realization.
“Yes! In the sterile refrigerator! Five vials!”
“Go get them!” I shouted.
“And bring three fifty-milliliter syringes, an eighteen-gauge bore needle, and a bag of sodium bicarbonate!”
Rossi scrambled to his feet, knocking over an antique globe as he tore down the marble stairs like a man pursued by devils.
Dominic’s body arched violently, a high, strangled rattle escaping his chest as a seizure racked his spine.
I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, holding his head against my chest, feeling the frantic, dying flutter of his heart through the bandage over his bullet wound.
“You don't get to die on this floor, Dominic Russo,” I whispered into his ear, my tears dropping onto his cold, sweaty forehead.
“You spent twenty years waiting for me to take my father’s chair.”
“You don't get to leave me alone in it after twelve hours.”
“Fight it.”
“Fight it, Dominic!”
His fingers twitched against my knee, his hand weakly attempting to find the platinum ring on my finger.
Thirty seconds later, Dr. Rossi burst back through the library doors, clutching three amber glass vials and a heavy plastic syringe filled with clear fluid.
“Twelve and a half grams!” Rossi yelled, dropping back to his knees.
“That is the maximum adult push!”
“Give it directly into the central line in his chest,” I ordered, pointing to the port catheter Dr. Rossi had installed during the shoulder surgery four hours earlier.
“Don't use the peripheral vein! The vessels are already collapsing!”
Rossi uncapped the thick needle with his teeth.
He drove the bore directly into the silicone port on Dominic’s chest and pushed the plunger down with the flat of his palm.
Twelve and a half grams of concentrated sodium thiosulfate surged directly into Dominic’s superior vena cava, binding to the cyanide ions in his bloodstream and converting the lethal poison into non-toxic thiocyanate before his brain cells suffocated.
For ten seconds, nothing happened.
The library was so quiet I could hear the rain tapping on the glass outside.
Marcus stood over the captured butler, his pistol hammer cocked, waiting for the verdict.
Dante held his breath, his scarred hand clamped over his radio.
Then, Dominic’s back violently snapped straight.
A deep, tearing gasp tore from his throat, like a drowning man breaking through the surface of an icy pond.
He threw up a mouthful of clear bile onto the floorboards, coughing so hard his incision tore, fresh red blood seeping through the white bandages on his chest.
His gray eyes flew open, wide, wild, and fully focused.
They locked onto my face.
“Casey...” he whispered, his voice broken, raw, but alive.
A ragged, shaking sob tore out of my throat as I lowered my forehead against his chest, feeling the stubborn, thudding rhythm of his heart beating against my cheek.
He was alive.
The master of the docks had survived the second execution.
Dominic lifted his heavy right arm, his trembling fingers tangling into the loose hair at the nape of my neck, holding me against him with all the strength he had left in his body.
“Who...” Dominic rasped, his voice scraping against his burned throat.
“The butler, Boss,” Marcus said from the window, hauling the bloody, broken old man up by the collar of his suit.
“Name is Paolo Vieri.”
“Been on the household staff for twelve years.”
Dominic slowly turned his head, his gray eyes hardening into the cold, merciless steel of an executioner.
Paolo Vieri hung in Marcus’s grip, his mouth leaking blood, his eyes shining with fanatical defiance.
“You are too late, Dominic,” the old man spat, coughing a bloody tooth onto the floor.
“Matteo Bellandi was never the architect.”
“Matteo was just the banker.”
“The order didn't come from Milan.”
Dominic’s breathing slowed, his voice dropping into that terrifying, subterranean register that made the room freeze.
“Where did it come from, Paolo?”
The old butler let out a hideous, wet cackle that ended in a cough.
“From the woman you put in the federal detention center this morning.”
“Victoria didn't leave her family’s legacy in your hands, Dominic.”
“She had a secondary contingency.”
“The real ledger... the one that names every federal judge, every senator, and every dock boss your father bought for forty years...”
Paolo’s smile stretched wide, revealing his bloody gums.
“It was never in Arthur Vance’s safe.”
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“It was in your mother’s crypt at Green-Wood Cemetery.”
“And twenty minutes ago, Victoria’s men cracked the stone.”
