The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(58)
“I wanted hot chicken tikka,” she replies, stomping across the room toward the chef. “Is it so much to ask that I get hot chicken tikka to make up for all the vegetable eating and not-sex-having I’ve endured?”
I’m praying she doesn’t ask the chef this. He stares at the two of us as we approach, and then looks at me, with relief. “Thank God,” he says. “You’re a doctor?”
Keeley groans audibly. “Because any emergency would be handled better by a man, right? No, I’m the doctor. He’s just here to hold my healing crystals. What’s going on?”
The chef’s eyes widen a little. He looks at me as if to say, “Is she serious?”
I shake my head, though you can never be too sure with Keeley. “Graciela, one of our line cooks, went into labor,” he says, still addressing me. “It’s bad. I think the baby’s coming out. We can…see it.”
Keeley stiffens. “Did you call an ambulance?”
“We did but they said it’ll be a while and—” He flinches as a female scream cuts through the air.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Keeley says, pushing past him like she owns the place. “You guys owe me some fresh chicken tikka.”
“Is she really a doctor?” he asks me as we follow.
“It shocks me too.”
The kitchen is at a standstill and most of the cooks have abandoned their posts to stare with horror at the woman now lying on a tablecloth on the kitchen floor.
Her legs are spread, and the top of a human head is visible between them. That’s terrifying enough, but it’s the bloody fluid beneath her that makes my pulse rise. Maybe it’s standard, but it has me remembering that first episode of Bridgerton, the one where a woman died in childbirth. Yes, it was a couple of centuries ago, but is this any different? With no ambulance coming, is there a single tool at Keeley’s disposal that wasn’t available three hundred years ago? And if this woman dies…what happens then?
Keeley skates through life as if nothing matters to her all that much, but if this goes badly, it will weigh on her every fucking day. She wept because she made the dog throw up. What would something like this do to her?
The woman cries out, and her pain sends a chill up my spine.
“Sink,” barks Keeley at the manager, who looks taken aback. She kicks off her heels and her precious Birkin is thrown to the ground as she crosses the kitchen while tying her hair back. She washes her arms all the way to her elbows, her brow furrowed…someone else entirely. Someone serious, focused. She dries her hands with paper towels and sinks to the floor between the woman’s legs.
“I’m Dr. Connolly,” she says. “Looks like you’re having a baby in a kitchen.”
The woman replies in rapid Spanish, and Keeley replies in kind. Again, I’m surprised. I pictured her as the sort to learn something like French simply because Paris has a better Fashion Week.
Keeley sounds…different, speaking Spanish. Assured, authoritative. I don’t even know what she’s saying, but I believe her. I’d believe anything Keeley said to me right now.
“I need a knife,” Keeley tells the manager. “The sharpest knife you have, and I need rubbing alcohol. It might not be necessary, but I want it here in case I do. And please, for the love of God, don’t come in here brandishing the knife so she can see it. Wrap it in a towel or something. And find out where the fuck that ambulance is.”
The woman screams as another contraction takes over. I flinch, but Keeley is steely-eyed, utterly calm, her voice alternately cajoling and forceful as she urges Graciela on.
Her hair is starting to escape the bun, clinging to the sweat on her forehead, which is the only signal I’ve got that Keeley isn’t completely relaxed. Well, that and her shoulders, which are tense as she reaches down to get a grip on the baby. Someone deposits a pile of towels beside her—she doesn’t seem to notice.
“?l está casi aquí,” Keeley says, her hands clasped on the baby’s shoulders. “Una vez más.”
The woman pushes, wailing, and I flinch. One of the men across the kitchen quietly opens the back door and pukes in the alley.
The woman cries out and then…the head emerges fully. Keeley works to get the top shoulder out, then the bottom and suddenly the baby just seems to slip free. A boy, covered in blood, his cry a shrill little bleating sound. A cheer echoes through the room but Keeley’s still focused, clearing his mouth and nose, checking his pulse, murmuring to herself, “Pink, one twenty, vigorous response, active.” Satisfied at last, she leans forward to hand the baby to his weeping mother.
Her expensive dress is ruined. The shoes she kicked off are sitting next to a mousetrap, and she’s smiling as if all is right with the world. There is so much more to her than she lets anyone see. There’s so much more to her than even she seems to see.
I just fell more in love with the mother of my child than I already was. Which is really inconvenient. I was already a little too far gone.
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KEELEY
Surprisingly, now that my dress is covered in blood and afterbirth, I don’t have much of an appetite for chicken tikka. We remain until the ambulance arrives and then I’m ushered out the back door, into the alley. Graham steers me around the vomit just outside, and I throw my ruined shoes in a dumpster.