ECHOES BETWEEN WARS • BOOK 2

The Mercy Wing

By Leo Vescari

Two broken men. One impossible mission. And a love that dares to take flight in the shadow of death.

Eddie Ocampo was built for the sky. A decorated Filipino-American pilot, he once commanded open skies with effortless grace — until Spanish influenza carved through his lungs and left him grounded, wheezing through three flights of stairs in a Chicago tenement. With blood-spotted handkerchiefs and a doctor's final verdict ringing in his ears, Eddie faces the slow, suffocating death of a man who has lost his purpose. Until he hears whispers of desperate communities and medicine that cannot reach the dying.

Silas McKean runs a barn infirmary in rural Illinois — twenty-five patients, dwindling morphine, and a secret that could destroy everything he has built. Expelled from medical school after a fatal error he cannot forgive himself for, Silas practices without credentials, without approval, and without hope of absolution. When a sharp-tongued, hollow-cheeked pilot stands up at a Grange Hall meeting and proposes the impossible, Silas doesn't know whether to arrest the man or trust him with everything.

Together, they forge an alliance as fragile as canvas wings. Eddie flies black-market serum through quarantine lines and vigilante gunfire. Silas patches the wounded and buries the ones he cannot save. But Will Bennett's armed roadblocks grow bolder, county officials circle like vultures, and every supply run edges closer to catastrophe. The cost of their reckless compassion is measured in bullet holes, cracked ribs, and stolen hours under a merciless Illinois sky.

But external dangers pale against what terrifies them most — the raw, inevitable pull between a dying man who flies anyway and a disgraced healer who refuses to surrender. Redemption has never felt so dangerous. And love, when it finally lands, may be the one thing neither man's body can survive.

A found-family, enemies-to-allies historical MM romance set against the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, featuring forbidden medicine, storm flights, and two irreparably broken men learning to heal each other.