Chapter 3 - THE DOCTOR IN THE DARK
-3-
Before Ivy could protest, before she could find the breath to reject his terrifying offer of protection, the heavy oak door behind Carmine clicked. The brass deadbolt slid back with a smooth, oiled hiss, and the door swung open just a fraction of an inch to reveal an elderly man carrying a battered leather medical bag.
He moved with the quiet, practiced efficiency of a battlefield surgeon who had spent decades stitching up men shot in back alleys and poker dens. Dr. Aris was a fixture of the Falcone estate—a brilliant, disgraced physician whose medical license had been quietly revoked by the state medical board thirty years ago, only to be permanently renewed by Carmine’s personal decree.
"You called, boss?" Dr. Aris muttered, his voice like gravel scraping across asphalt. He stepped into the kitchen, his faded gray eyes immediately bypassing Carmine to lock onto Ivy’s swollen face and battered frame. A heavy sigh escaped the old doctor's lips. "Ah. Another late-night wrestling match with reality, I see."
"Shut the door, Aris, and get your kit on the table," Carmine ordered, his tone brook no argument. He stepped back, giving the doctor room to work, though he didn't leave Ivy’s side. His presence remained a solid, unyielding barricade between her and the rest of the world.
Ivy instinctively shrank away, pulling her torn collar tighter around her throat. "No, please. I don't need a doctor. I'm fine. It's just a few bruises—"
"Quiet, Ivy," Carmine cut her off, his voice flat and absolute. "Sit down."
Dr. Aris didn't wait for her permission. He grabbed a heavy wooden chair from the corner of the kitchen, placed it firmly behind her knees, and practically forced her down into it. The moment she sat, a sharp, agonizing gasp escaped her lips as her fractured ribs ground together under the sudden shift in posture.
"Ribs," Dr. Aris diagnosed clinically, setting his leather bag on the stainless-steel prep table and snapping open the brass latches. "At least two cracked on the left lateral side, possibly three. The swelling around the orbit of the left eye indicates a severe blunt-force impact, though thankfully the zygomatic arch isn't shattered. And the laceration on the lip requires three stitches, maybe four."
He pulled out a pair of sterile medical scissors and unceremoniously began snipping away the remaining threads of Ivy’s already ruined uniform collar to get a better look at the massive, ugly contusions spreading across her chest and shoulders.
Ivy squeezed her eyes shut, hot tears of humiliation and pain burning beneath her eyelids. She hated being exposed like this—parade-ready for an autopsy while completely powerless. To be examined by a mob doctor in the dead of night in the basement of the most feared man in the city felt like the absolute nadir of her existence.
"Hold still," Dr. Aris grunted, swabbing a stinging antiseptic across the split corner of her mouth.
Ivy winced, her fingers gripping the edge of the wooden chair so hard her knuckles turned white.
"Be gentle with her, Aris, or I'll find a new use for that bone saw in your bag," Carmine’s voice cut through the sterile air, cold and deadly serious.
The old doctor didn't even flinch. He had clearly spent decades working under Carmine’s roof and had long since lost the capacity to be intimidated. "If she wants the internal bleeding in her chest wall to stop without puncturing a lung, boss, she’s going to feel a little discomfort. Pain is a very effective teacher. Maybe next time she'll know how to dodge a boot."
"There won't be a next time," Carmine said. The sentence wasn't spoken loudly, but it carried the chilling finality of a guillotine blade dropping in an empty square.
Dr. Aris paused, glancing up from his instruments to catch the dark, lethal expression on Carmine’s face. A knowing, grim nod passed between the two men—a silent language of violence and execution that Ivy couldn't begin to decode.
For the next twenty minutes, the basement kitchen was filled only with the clinical sounds of medical instruments clinking against metal, the sharp sting of disinfectant, and Ivy’s muffled, ragged breathing. Dr. Aris wrapped a tight, restrictive elastic binder around her ribs, compressing her torso to stabilize the fractured bones, and expertly stitched the torn skin of her lip with steady, unblinking hands.
When the doctor finally packed up his gear and snapped his bag shut, Ivy felt like she had been put back together with duct tape and prayer.
"She's stabilized for now," Dr. Aris told Carmine, pulling off his latex gloves and tossing them into the biohazard bin. "No heavy lifting for at least four weeks. Deep breathing exercises to prevent pneumonia. And she needs actual sleep in a real bed, not scrubbing pans at three in the morning."
"Thank you, Doctor," Ivy whispered, her voice muffled by the thick gauze and stitches on her lip.
Dr. Aris offered her a brief, grim smile that didn't reach his tired eyes. "Don't thank me, child. Thank the boss. Usually, when he drags me down here at this hour, I'm bringing a body bag, not a suture kit."
With that, the old doctor packed his bag, nodded to Carmine, and shuffled back out the door, leaving the heavy oak portal slightly ajar.
The silence rushed back in, thicker and more oppressive than before.
Carmine remained leaning against the prep table, watching Ivy as she gingerly tested her breath against the tight elastic binder around her ribs. The pain was significantly dulled, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache, but she could actually draw a full lungful of air for the first time in hours.
"Can you stand?" Carmine asked.
Ivy looked up at him, her heart skipping a beat. "I... I think so."
"Good," he said, pushing himself off the table. "Because you're not staying in the staff quarters tonight. And you're certainly not going back to that rat-trap apartment on 4th Street where Mickey Rossi’s collectors know where to find you."
Panic flared anew in Ivy’s chest. "My apartment? Mr. Falcone, I can't leave! All my mother's things are there. My rent is paid through the end of the month—"
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"Your apartment was firebombed twenty minutes ago," Carmine interrupted flatly, cutting off her frantic protests with the casual delivery of a weather report.
Ivy stopped breathing. The world tilted violently off its axis, spinning into a dark, terrifying void.
