Chapter One

“MOS arriving now!” one of the nurses called out from the hospital’s emergency room desk.

Dr. Tori Sampson stood just outside ER 2, waiting for the ambulance to roll in with a “member of service,” either a police officer, firefighter, or EMS injured on duty.

Seconds later, a large man wearing black cargo pants, a black shirt, and a gun strapped to his thigh, along with Aiko, one of the nurses who’d been waiting curbside to assist, rushed a stretcher through the ER doors. A paramedic held a bag-valve mask over the patient’s mouth and nose, squeezing the bag, while another paramedic administered walking chest compressions as he kept pace with the stretcher. More uniformed officers crowded in behind them.

“In here.” Tori pointed to ER 2, inside of which two other nurses and a respiratory therapist were already waiting.

They’d gotten the call from the paramedics while they’d been en route to the hospital. All Tori knew at this point was that the officer had been exposed to something highly toxic and was in cardiac arrest.

“Suzie, I need you,” she called to her friend. To the other nurse behind the desk, she ordered calmly, “Call Dr. Barnett.”

“Move aside, please.” Suzie pushed through the throng of walking, talking testosterone. “We’ll take it from here.” At only five-three, Suzie somehow managed to take control of the situation and helped roll the stretcher the rest of the way into ER 2.

Knowing how tightknit cops were, Tori closed the door in the men’s faces. If she didn’t, they’d be hovering like a swarm of bees. Armed bees.

Between herself, the two paramedics, the cop who’d come with them, four nurses, and Ashanti, the respiratory therapist, the small room was packed.

“Get him on the bed,” Tori ordered, standing back to give the paramedics room to work. “What do we have?” she asked.

The cop assisted the paramedics in transferring the patient to the ER stretcher. That’s when she noticed the embroidered words on the cop’s shirt: DEA K-9 Unit. Wonderful. It just had to be DEA agents. The bane of her family’s existence.

“Patient is thirty-five years old, found down with suspected opioid exposure during a raid. He was in respiratory arrest when we arrived on scene. This guy,” the paramedic said, nodding to the cop, “was giving him mouth to mouth. We tubed him.” Again, he nodded to the cop. “He gave him eight milligrams intranasal Narcan. We gave him another two. He went into VTAC arrest during transport. We’ve been doing compressions, gave him two epis, three hundred milligrams of amiodarone, and three shocks. The last was two minutes ago. On our monitor, he’s still in VTAC. Our last rhythm check was PEA.”

Pulseless electrical activity. Damn. He still wasn’t responding. “How long has he been in VTAC?” Tori asked.

“About eight minutes.”

“Hook him up to our monitor, start another line, and get the auto-compressor on him.” She watched the flurry of activity as Suzie quickly started another IV line, while the other nurses switched the heart leads to the ER’s cardiac monitor and moved to position the chest compression system over the patient’s chest. “Stand back,” she ordered the cop. As if the room wasn’t tight enough with all the hospital personnel, now she had to contend with this giant K-9 cop getting in her way. “Please, go to the waiting room.”

Finally, he backed away but didn’t leave the room. Right now, she didn’t have time to deal with him.

While the auto-compressor was positioned and turned on, the respiratory therapist took over for the paramedic squeezing the bag-valve mask.

“Give him another milligram of epi.” Tori moved over to give one of the nurses room to adjust the auto-compressor and bumped into something solid and unmoving. Correction, someone solid and unmoving. The damned cop. Hadn’t she told him to get lost?

Since he was still here… “What exactly was he exposed to?” she asked him. Not that it made a difference in her treatment protocol, but she wanted to confirm her suspicions.

“I don’t know exactly,” the cop bit out. “Some kind of opioid.”

“Opioids? Where are his clothes?” The patient was in his underwear, and she didn’t want hospital staff exposed to any opioid residue.

“Bagged,” the cop said.

“A bad batch of something’s going around,” one of the paramedics said. “We’ve been averaging eight ODs a day in our area alone this week. And those are just the ones we know about, let alone hung on long enough for us to get there. We’re going through naloxone like it’s water.”

Tori held back a few choice expletives. This particular opioid concoction was killing people left and right. Apparently even the DEA wasn’t immune. She suspected this agent had been exposed to the same thing. The detailed labs she’d been requesting on her OD patients would confirm it.

“His capnography just jumped,” Ashanti said.

“Stop the compressor, and check the rhythm.” Keeping her eyes fastened on the monitor, Tori checked for a pulse at the man’s carotid.

C’mon. Beat, goddammit. Her own heart seemed to slow as she waited for a telltale blip.

The green line on the cardiac monitor jumped, and she felt a weak pulse beneath her fingers. “There you go. Hang in there.”

A collective sigh came from everyone in the room, including her. “Sinus rhythm.” Now to get him breathing on his own. “How much naloxone do we have in this room?”

“One vial.” Suzie tore the wrapper off another syringe. She popped the cap and drew out the remaining naloxone.

“Push another point-five milligrams, then check Room 4 for more. Hit up the pharmacy if you have to.” Because if this agent was exposed to the same opioid cocktail she suspected he was they’d need a lot more naloxone. “And page Dr. Barnett. Tell him we have another one, and I need his help.” Her friend, Wil, had an inherent understanding of just what treatments worked best on OD patients, especially the bad ones. Like this one. With that much naloxone, he should have responded and been breathing on his own by now.

Suzie administered the next dose of naloxone then hustled from the room.

Tori touched the man’s cheek. “Cold and clammy,” she muttered then pushed up one of his eyelids. “Pinpoint pupils.” All classic symptoms of an overdose. Still examining her patient, she asked the paramedics, “How long wasn’t he breathing on his own?” When no one answered, she looked up to find them watching the K-9 cop, who was grinding his jaw so hard the muscles in his lean cheeks rippled and flexed.

“Do you have any idea how long he wasn’t breathing?” she asked.

“No,” he gritted out.

“No?” She glared at the agent—A. Decker, according to the tag on his shirt. In addition to him, there had to be a dozen other cops and DEA agents in the waiting room. “He’s one of your own. How could you not know?”

“We got separated,” he growled.

“Did he inhale it, or just touch it?” She’d read that a police officer in Pennsylvania had brushed some kind of opioid powder off his hand then passed out a few minutes later.

“I don’t know.” His brows lowered as he watched her with something akin to suspicion.

What he had to be suspicious of her for, she didn’t know.

Suzie ran back in, holding a full box of vials. “Got it.”

“Push another point-five milligrams,” she ordered then watched Suzie inject it into the IV.

The man’s pulse grew stronger, as did his blood pressure. His chest began rising and falling on its own. “Spontaneous ventilation.”

Tori blew out a breath. Another overdose snatched from the clutches of the Grim Reaper himself.

She turned back to the agent. “He’s stable, but since we don’t know how long he wasn’t breathing, we won’t know for a while if there was any hypoxic brain damage. We’ll monitor him until he wakes up. For now, you can go to the waiting room with your colleagues, and I’ll be out later to give you an update.”

Decker’s glower darkened as he crossed powerfully muscled arms over his broad chest. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Tori clamped her jaw together. “I really don’t have time for this. What I need is for you to leave my ER.” She turned back to her patient, expecting to hear the agent’s size twelve shit-kicker boots clomping on the tile floor as he left the room. She didn’t. What she did hear was the man’s impatient exhale.

Slowly, she turned and parked her hands on her hips. “Agent Decker, I’m only going to say this one more time. Get. Out.”

This time, he clamped his jaw. “Forget it, doc. I’m not leaving.”

She eyed the man from head to toe. He was about six-two or more, seemingly made of solid muscle and probably weighed in at well over two hundred pounds. She, on the other hand, was five-four and around one hundred twenty-five pounds. Manhandling him out the door was a pipe dream. “Why the hell not?” she countered.

His nostrils flared as he crossed his arms. “It’s protocol. We don’t ever leave one of our own unconscious and unattended in a hospital.”

“He’s in the safest place he could possibly be. This is one of the best medical facilities in the state of Colorado. I assure you he’s safe here.”

His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She fisted the hands already on her hips. For some reason, this guy didn’t trust her. Not that she cared one bit whether anyone in the heavy-handed DEA did. She didn’t trust him.

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” He spat out her profession as if it tasted badly rolling off his tongue. “Not all doctors know what they’re doing.”

“Newsflash, tough guy. I do. I took an oath to save people, and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure your friend lives.” Regardless of the fact that he worked for the DEA—the agency responsible for making her family’s life a living hell. “Perhaps you’d care to explain what you’re so concerned about.”

“I don’t trust doctors. I want to make sure you don’t give him something he doesn’t need.”

“Doesn’t need?” She shook her head in disbelief, still not understanding what this guy’s problem was. “If he needs something, I’ll give it to him. If he doesn’t, I won’t. Giving patients meds they don’t need isn’t something we do here.”

Dark eyes narrowed farther, as if he were contemplating her words and not sure whether to believe her. “Okay,” he said finally. “As long as you’re the only doctor making that decision for him. Promise me.”

Ah, the irony. If it weren’t for the DEA, her life could have been so different. Maybe her mother would still be alive today. “Fine, I promise,” she capitulated with a discerned edge to her voice that she couldn’t hold back.

Tori’s friend and fellow ER doctor, Wil Barnett, strode through the doors, followed by David, the orderly whose assistance she’d needed an hour ago on another case. David stood off to the side, averting his gaze as if he was afraid to look at her.

Wil eyed Agent Decker curiously. He often joked that guys in law enforcement were all macho men who needed big guns to make up for having small genitalia. “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Standing guard,” the agent said. Backing up his words, Agent Decker stood his ground, holding Wil’s amused gaze without flinching. Not that she was surprised. In addition to the gun on the agent’s belt, he probably had at least sixty pounds on her friend.

“Against what?” Wil asked, brushing past him.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Agent Decker said with a deadly glint in his eye as he followed Wil’s every move like a tiger ready to attack.

“Probably not,” Wil conceded with an arched brow.

Exhaustion settled over Tori like an angry storm cloud. She was mentally exhausted from treating overdose victims. The last few months had been like a revolving door in the ER, but this week was shaping up to be a whole new level of chaos.

The most recent victim, Tyler, was a seventeen-year-old boy on life support. That one had hit her the hardest. Unlike this DEA agent, Tyler’s parents didn’t find him until it was too late. He wasn’t breathing, and hypoxic brain injury had already set in. Medically speaking, the boy’s brain was dead. His parents were grappling with the traumatic decision to take their son off life support.

She checked her patient’s vitals one more time. “He’s doing well,” she said, hoping to reassure Agent Decker sufficiently to get him out of the ER. “We’ll know more when he wakes up.”

Beneath his crossed arms, the agent’s knuckles whitened.

Okay, so he wasn’t going to take her hint to leave.

She had to crane her neck to look up at him. A pair of intense, dark brown eyes that held zero warmth stared down at her. If he thought for one second that his glowering cop-look would intimidate her, he was about to be sadly mistaken.

Controlling everything that happened in the ER was paramount. Lives depended on everyone doing things by the book and according to protocol. Having a cop the size of a linebacker taking up critical space in the room was unacceptable. “I gave you my word. I’ll watch over him personally, but I want something from you in return.”

“What?” he growled.

“I want you out of here. Now.”

Agent Decker took another deep breath, and for a moment she didn’t think he would obey. Finally, he surprised her by executing a military-precision about-face and heading for the door.

“Wait.” A last-minute spurt of compassion took root, along with a sprinkling of guilt over her unprofessional bitchiness toward the man. DEA or not, he obviously cared for his friend, and she respected that. She deposited her gloves and mask in the biohazard bin then escorted him to the waiting room doors. “I can’t make any guarantees, but your friend really is responding well to the naloxone.”

When he turned and locked gazes with her, her mouth went just a teensy, weensy bit dry.

In the examining room, she’d been concentrating on her patient, then she’d been so annoyed with Agent Decker that she hadn’t really seen him. There was no denying he brought out the fifty shades of animosity, but one thing was for certain: with his chiseled jawline, slightly cleft chin, and sexy as all-get-out five o’clock shadow, the man was about as handsome as it got. Hard not to admire his muscular physique, either. He must spend all his free time in a gym, lifting barbells and dumbbells and whatever other bells made a man’s body that way.

He closed his eyes, as if reciting a mental prayer. “Thanks, Doc.”

The last thing she wanted was gratitude from the DEA. The short-lived attempt to rein in her internal bitch flew out the window as the past came roaring back in a rush of emotion. Especially the distraught look on her dad’s face that fateful day.

“Don’t thank me,” she bit out. “I’m just doing my job. Maybe if the great and powerful DEA did its job, drugs wouldn’t be sold on every street corner in Denver, and Colorado’s opioid crisis wouldn’t be spiraling out of control. Your friend is the third opioid overdose I’ve treated today, and the tenth this week. Three of those patients died. And that’s just on my shifts. I can’t speak to what happens when I’m not here or how many are dying before they even get to the hospital.” She blew out a breath and grappled for a calm she didn’t feel. “Whatever just hit the streets could be the beginning of something really scary, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. But you can.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but she cut him off. “And another thing.” She jabbed a finger at him. “This is my castle, not the DEA’s. If you ever come into my ER again, I’ll have you thrown out on your muscled ass.”

…

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