Introducing Doctor Gianna

Helping Mr. Gang Leader

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Chapter 1:

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On the day Gianna’s life changed drastically and irreparably, she endured a particularly painful luncheon with her father.

Gianna, for the most part, considered herself to be a respectful and obedient daughter.

She was, to the best of her ability, the perfect daughter.

But her father was a particularly hard man to please, and nothing Gianna had ever done felt like enough.

Gianna had an ulcer by sixteen, hair falling out by seventeen, and by eighteen she went away to college to save herself more than anything else.

“—could have been something special. Wasted opportunity, that’s what you are.”

Gianna tapped a finger gently against the condensation on her water glass.

“--paying attention, Gianna?”

She straightened up. “Yes, of course.”

“Oh?” Her father asked, a gray eyebrow raised.

“I believe you were lamenting on my poor career choices,” Gianna told him, a little too flippantly if the way her father’s eyes narrowed, meant anything.

“Watch yourself,” Her father snapped, then drank from his own glass of water.

Gianna sighed and sank a little in her seat. “I’m a doctor, dad. I don’t understand why you’re so continuously upset.”

More than being a doctor, she was a young one at that. She had graduated high school at seventeen, had a bachelor’s degree by twenty, and started her residency six months after that. At twenty-four Gianna didn’t think it was presumptuous or prideful to say she was above the curve, and far ahead of her peers.

“It’s not your career I take issue with,” Her father replied right away. “It’s what you’re choosing to do with that medical license of yours.”

Of course it was.

-if treating the poor and financially disadvantaged was what he meant.

“Shutting yourself up in that thing you call a clinic. The three room shack you call your practice. It’s lunacy, Gianna. You could be established at the best hospital in this city, probably the whole of Sangrid. But look where you are instead.”

“It’s not about the prestige for me,” Gianna said quickly, tightlipped. “It’s not about the money, either.” It was about helping people who needed it.

Her father sighed. “All that time spent training meticulously under Doctor Leo. All those years wasted honing a specialty.”

Again, her father gave a disappointed sigh. “Five years of preferential treatment from Doctor Leo, specialty training and promises, and you throw it all away to be piteous and charitable.”

Gianna risked a smile. “I told you, I’m not a doctor for the recognition or the money. I only want to save lives, and by not working in the fancy hospital that you think I should be at

Gianna startled and visibly flinched as her father’s heavy hand came down on the table, rattling the silverware, plates, and glasses. Around them people looked and she felt her face heat.

“For god sakes, Gianna,” Her father hissed at her, “you could have been the best oncologist of your generation.

Her father’s hands were shaking, and it was how, more than the loud explosion moments earlier, that Gianna knew she had truly infuriated her father.

“Gianna.”

They lapsed into an uneasy silence.

Then finally she said, “I’m not giving up what I have, dad. Not even for your approval.”

There was the oddest flicker of something across her father’s face before he said, “I don’t like where you work--that part of your city. It isn’t safe for you.”

Now her father looked truly pained.

And it took Gianna a second to realize why, and then a second more to feel truly regretful.

“Nothing is going to happen to me, dad. I don’t--”

“I need your help,” Her father cut in expertly, eating once more. “I need you to talk to your brother.”

Gianna asked unexpectedly, “Is everything okay with Giovanni?”

“He’s insisting he move into a dorm,” Gianna’s father snorted. “It’s ridiculous. The university is fifteen minutes away from the house.”

“Oh,” She eased out. “He’s eighteen, dad,” She said, taking her first bite of her meal.

“Nonsense,” Her father said quickly. “You lived at home.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to convince him,” Gianna said honestly, and not just because she wanted Giovanni to be free.

Free to be his own man and make his own mistakes and learn and grow.

Gianna’s father barked out, “Bah, it’s a terrible idea. You always kept in line, your brother isn’t the same. If I let him go off and live in the dorms he’ll fall in with the wrong crowd. He won’t keep to his studies. He’ll start downhill and won’t recover.”

She cut in with a fake, shocked voice, “He might even, dare I propose it, become a liberal arts major.”

Her father went pale and demanded, “Are you trying to give me a heart attack, Gianna?”

In a reflexive move, her own hand came up to her heart. “No.”

Her father eyed her for a moment, then asked in a rough kind of way, “Are you keeping up with your medication?”

Gianna cracked another smile. “I very much wouldn’t be sitting here, talking with you if I weren’t.”

“Good,” Her father said, and it was probably the closest her father would ever come to keeping up with her health and caring for her.

Gianna wasn’t a ten-year-old anymore.

She wasn’t the poor, pathetic girl clinging to the side of a hospital bed, gasping for air as her heart beat irregularly. And she wasn’t the kid who was scared she’d go to sleep and never wake up.

“Look,” Gianna said, as a means of appeasement, “I’ll speak to Giovanni. We’re supposed to be spending the day together on Sunday.”

“Talk to your brother,” Her father said in response

They parted quickly after that.

Her father headed to the black sedan that was government issued, and Gianna went instead to the bus stop. In twenty minutes, she expected to be back at her clinic, seeing her next patient of the day, putting her father away from thought until the following week.

***

***

The clinic that Gianna called home--quite literally as she lived in the small, one bedroom apartment above it, was a building that had certainly seen better days.

Robbery was Gianna’s biggest fear. It was a real fear that led to bars on the windows, double locks on the doors, and a portion of the month’s expenses going to a protection fee.

A protection fee.

It was disgusting to think that Gianna had to pay a different set of thugs money to keep the more unorganized ones away, but at the moment she didn’t have a choice.

Her life wasn’t terribly exciting, Gianna recognized, but it was fulfilling, and it was the one that she’d chosen.

Around an hour after midnight, with Gianna’s eyes starting to feel heavy and her tablet dimming from going idle on the medical journal she’d been browsing, she heard something that had only reached her ears once before.

Gianna heard the security system going off.

She rolled from her bed immediately, stumbling until she got her feet underneath her a second later, and then she was making a mad dash for the stairs.

When she reached the bottom, she swung wide, swiping up a nearby baseball bat, and then leveled it up. Her ears were ringing wildly with a piercing sound but she didn’t let herself stop.

“Whoever you are,” She called out sharply, “you’d better get lost! That alarm means the police are on the way, and I’m armed!”

“I mean it! Get lost!”

Something heavy thumped in rapid succession from the front of the clinic and Gianna started forward. She had never been particularly brave or athletic or physical. She wasn’t sure she could hold her own against one person, let alone a group of them. But there was no other alternative. And she had to set an example.

She had to let everyone else in the neighborhood know that they couldn’t make an easy mark of her. No one was going to steal from her clinic and get away with it.

She could hear muffled voices ahead of her and Gianna held the bat more securely as she took heavy steps.

“I’m not--”

She broke off suddenly at the sight of three men. Three. An impossible number to deal with.

And if she had three intruders in his clinic that provided cheap medical services to people who desperately needed it, what the hell was she paying protection money for in the first place?

One of the men was injured.

That was what Gianna managed to realize as her heart thundered in her chest painfully, making her feel light headed and short of breath. In fact, the room was starting to spin around her and she wasn’t sure if she was swaying on her feet or merely her vision was starting to go.

They were all precursors that she needed to calm down, and quickly.

Blood. Gianna could see blood soaking the side of one of the men. He was barely on his feet, his knees bowing out, and there was a second man practically holding him up. The second of the two didn’t look much better, with a spectacularly impressive bruise across his lower jaw that would lead to even more extreme swelling in a day or so.

“We need help,” The man supporting the other up said roughly, voice strained like he’d been yelling or screaming. “Are you a doctor? We need a doctor.” He hefted the slumped man up a little and said, “He’s been shot.”

In her panic, Gianna looked down to her own plain blue pajamas.

“Hey!” the third man snapped, cutting in between the two injured ones. The third looked roughed up, but no worse for wear. “He asked you a question!”

“Y-yes,” Gianna managed to choke out, but she lost her grip on the baseball bat and had to lean on a nearby wall. She heard the bat clatter to the ground as she saw the gun.

The third man, security in his grip, held a small, black pistol. And it was aimed at her.

“I …” She was having even more trouble breathing and there were spots in her vision now.

The third man, punctuating his words carefully, snapped out, “You save him. Now.”

“The clinic isn’t--”

“Now!” the man thundered, gesturing down to the gun. “Or I’m not going to be heartbroken about emptying this into you.”

She turned on heel, the baseball ball on the ground, and dashed for the nearby break room.

She heard shouting after her but she didn’t pay it any mind. The world was seemingly melting in front of her as she threw open a cabinet drawer so hard that the contents spilled onto the floor. Then she was on her hands and knees, ripping open the emergency pill bottle and dry swallowing an obscenely large pill.

Gasping for air, Gianna looked up to see the man with the gun in the doorway. And the gun was still pointed at her, too.

She ignored him, instead closing her eyes, hoping desperately that her heart would calm on its own, her breathing would even out, and that she wouldn’t pass out and make for a large, still target.

“--hear my friend when he said--”

Gianna dug her fingers into her hair.

Breathe, she told herself. Breathe and remain calm.

She jumped sharply when warm, gentle hands rested on her back, tugging her into an odd, almost uncomfortable hug.

What the hell was her attacker doing, hugging her?

“Gia!”

She blinked her eyes open sharply at the familiar voice.

She gasped out, “Giovanni?”

She had to be hallucinating. That was the only way her younger brother was in front of her, crouched on the floor amidst the chaos, looking at her with a worried expression and blood smeared across his forehead.