Chapter 6 - Shadows in the ER
The room went entirely silent except for the low hiss of the air filtration system.
Evelyn stared at Adrian’s hand wrapped around her wrist.
She could feel the steady, heavy beat of her own heart beneath his calloused thumb.
“What did you say?” she asked, her voice dangerously quiet.
“You were seen,” Adrian repeated.
His gray eyes were steady, showing neither panic nor remorse, only the cold, mechanical reality of the world he inhabited.
“When Dante brought the sedan to St. Matthew’s, there was an unmarked gray sedan parked across the street.”
“It belonged to Marco Moretti’s crew.”
“They know you treated me last night.”
“They know you left with my man tonight.”
“In their calculations, that makes you an asset.”
“Or a leverage point.”
Evelyn yanked her wrist out of his grasp with such violence that her shoulder popped.
“You dragged me into this,” she said, her voice shaking with rage.
“I got into your car by accident!”
“I gave you juice!”
“I saved your miserable, arrogant life twice, and you turned me into a target for mobsters?”
Dante stepped forward, his expression tight.
“Miss Hart, Mr. Vale didn’t plan this—”
“Shut up, Dante!” she shouted, turning on him with bared teeth.
“Just shut up!”
She spun back to Adrian, who hadn’t moved.
He sat in the chair, shirtless, stitched up, his bleeding stopped, looking for all the world like a fallen emperor who had simply accepted the cost of his crown.
“I have a mother,” Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a fierce, ragged whisper.
“I have a job.”
“I have patients who need me on Monday morning.”
“You cleared my mother’s house not to help me, but to buy me.”
“To make sure I couldn't run when your blood spilled onto my shoes.”
Adrian looked at her for a long, quiet moment.
“I paid the mortgage because you earned it,” he said evenly.
“I brought you here tonight because I was dying.”
“Both were transactions.”
“The fact that Moretti saw you is an operational failure.”
He looked at Dante.
The look was cold enough to freeze water.
Dante bowed his head slightly, his jaw clenched, accepting the blame without a word of defense.
“An operational failure?” Evelyn repeated, a bitter laugh escaping her throat.
“That’s what you call my life being destroyed?”
“Your life is not destroyed,” Adrian said, pushing himself up from the chair.
He swayed slightly as his feet hit the floor, his face draining of color, but he refused Dante’s outstretched hand.
He stood fully upright, taller than Evelyn by nearly a foot, imposing even in his wounded, half-naked state.
“Your life has simply changed jurisdiction.”
“I am not your property, Adrian Vale.”
“No,” he agreed, stepping closer until she could smell the copper of his blood and the clean, expensive soap on his skin.
“You are not.”
“Which is why you are still breathing.”
“Anyone else who spoke to me in that tone would have been removed from this building forty floors ago.”
“Is that supposed to make me grateful?”
“It is supposed to make you realistic.”
He walked slowly toward the panoramic window, his bare feet silent on the dark wood.
He looked out over the glittering grid of Chicago below.
“Moretti wants the river terminals,” Adrian said, speaking to the glass.
“He’s been trying to squeeze my supply lines for six months.”
“Shooting me outside the Board of Trade today was a desperate gamble.”
“He assumed that if I didn't die immediately, I would go to Northwestern Memorial.”
“He had four men waiting in the trauma receiving bay to finish the work.”
Evelyn felt a cold, sick chill settle in the pit of her stomach.
Northwestern was three miles from St. Matthew’s.
The medical community in Chicago was small; she knew half the trauma nurses at Northwestern.
If Adrian had gone there, those nurses would have been caught in the crossfire.
“He didn’t expect me to vanish,” Adrian continued.
“And then he saw my car at St. Matthew’s.”
“He thinks you are my private physician.”
“He thinks you are the reason his coup failed.”
He turned back to look at her.
“If you walk out of that lobby tonight, Evelyn, you will not make it three blocks.”
“They will take you.”
“They will ask you where I am, how badly I am hurt, and whether I can hold a gun.”
“And when you tell them the truth—that you know nothing—they will kill you anyway because you are of no further use.”
Evelyn stared at him.
The sheer, brutal logic of it was undeniable.
She had seen what these men did to each other.
She had cleaned the powder burns off dead boys and stitched the defensive wounds on terrified women who had simply been standing too close to the wrong man.
She looked down at her hands.
Her knuckles were raw from scrubbing with hospital-grade disinfectant.
She had spent her entire adult life trying to save people from the dark, chaotic violence of this city.
And now the darkness had reached out and swallowed her whole.
“What do we do?” she whispered, hating how small her voice sounded.
Adrian walked back toward her, his movements slow, deliberate, fighting through the agony of his stitched muscle.
He stopped two feet away.
“You stay here tonight,” he said.
“Dante will place two men outside your mother’s house in Cicero within the hour.”
“She will not be touched.”
“And tomorrow?” she asked.
Adrian’s eyes darkened, turning the color of deep, churning storm clouds.
May you like
“Tomorrow,” he said softly, “I remind Marco Moretti why he spent eight years hiding in Montreal.”
***
