Whether it was his voice or the heavy dose of sedatives finally hitting her bloodstream, the convulsions suddenly stopped. Lili’s body went completely limp against the pillows. The terrifying movement beneath her skin slowed, settling back into a rigid, swollen dome.
The monitors gradually decelerated, their frantic beeping returning to a tense, unstable rhythm.
Dr. Velázquez wiped a sheen of cold sweat from her forehead, her hands visibly shaking as she checked Lili’s pupils. “She’s under. But her oxygen saturation is dropping. The mass is pushing up against her diaphragm. If we don’t operate to remove it within the next few hours, she will suffocate from the inside out.”
“Then operate,” Tomás said, his voice raw. “Cut it out of her.”
“An open-cavity laparotomy on a child this malnourished, with a mass attached to her major arteries? The mortality rate is over ninety percent, Sĩ quan Reyes,” Cassandra said, looking him dead in the eye. “She’ll bleed out on the table before I can even make the first major incision. But if I don’t operate… she dies anyway.”
Before Tomás could answer, his personal phone buzzed violently in his pocket. It was Mariana Flores. He stepped out of the ICU and pressed the phone to his ear.
“Tomás,” Mariana’s voice came through, breathless and laced with panic. “You need to get back to the Alamo Street house right now.”
“Mariana, I can’t leave the hospital. The girl almost died a minute ago. They’re preparing for an emergency surgery—”
