Chapter 5 - Blood and Bone
Grace moved with the speed of a striking viper.
In five seconds, she clamped the IV line, yanked it out of the plastic bottle, and screwed it back into Caleb’s venous port, opening the roller clamp just enough to let the fluid begin dripping again. She capped the plastic bottle, shoved it deep into the pocket of her apron, and threw the heavy comforter back over Caleb’s legs.
“Close your eyes,” she hissed.
Caleb let his head fall back against the pillows. He let his jaw drop, relaxed his shoulders, and allowed his eyelids to flutter shut, leaving only a hairline crack of vision.
The double doors swung open.
Nurse Henderson walked in, smelling faintly of synthetic menthol and damp winter air. She walked straight to the IV pole, tapped the plastic bag with her fingernail to check the fluid level, and nodded to herself.
Half the bag was gone. Exactly as it should be after twenty minutes.
She looked down at Caleb. He didn't move. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic, convincing.
“Sleep well, Mr. Mercer,” she murmured, her tone devoid of emotion. She reached down, pulled the blanket up to his chin, turned off the bedside lamp completely, and walked out, the lock clicking into place behind her.
In the pitch-black darkness of the bedroom, Caleb opened his eyes.
He waited five full minutes, counting each second by the rhythmic pulse thudding behind his ears, until he was certain Henderson was down the hall and the security guards at the end of the corridor had settled back into their chairs.
Then, from the shadows near the bathroom door, Grace stepped out.
“She’s gone,” Grace whispered.
“Lock the door from the inside,” Caleb said. His voice was hoarse, raw from the sheer physical exertion of that single, three-millimeter twitch.
Grace crossed the room and turned the heavy brass deadbolt. The lock engaged with a solid, mechanical *thunk*.
She returned to the bed and switched on a tiny penlight she used for inspecting baseboards, pointing the beam away from the windows so no light would reflect across the lake.
“Now what?” she asked.
Caleb looked at his legs under the duvet. The fire in his lower spine hadn't faded; it was throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache that felt like molten lead being poured into his marrow. It was excruciating, but it was *alive*.
“Now,” Caleb said, “you help me out of this bed.”
Grace stared at him in the dim penlight beam. “Are you out of your mind? You just moved a toe. You can’t stand.”
“I don't need to stand,” Caleb said. “I need to fall. I need to hit the floor and see what happens when the nerves have to carry weight. If I wait for the chemical to clear naturally, Owen will have the papers signed and my throat cut before Friday morning.”
“Caleb—”
“Grace,” he cut her off, his voice dropping into that absolute, immovable register that brooked no debate. “You told me this morning that your father died because he was too stubborn to call someone who could fight. I am the someone who fights. But I can’t do it from a mattress. Pull the blankets off.”
She looked at him for three long seconds. In the narrow beam of the penlight, her gray-blue eyes were hard, calculating, measuring his resolve against the sheer insanity of the request.
Then, without another word, she stripped the blankets away.
“Grab my shoulders,” Caleb ordered.
Grace leaned across the mattress, her arms sliding under his armpits. She was stronger than she looked; her muscles were lean and hardened from years of turning mattresses, scrubbing stone, and hauling buckets of water. Her hair brushed against his cheek, smelling of cheap lemon soap and clean rain.
Caleb wrapped his massive, scarred arms around her upper back.
“On three,” he whispered. “One. Two. Three.”
With a low grunt, Caleb hauled his upper body toward the edge of the mattress. His torso obeyed instantly, his back muscles bunching with familiar power, but his hips and legs dragged behind like dead timber.
They reached the edge.
His bare feet dropped off the side, hitting the cold oak floorboards with a dull, limp thud.
For a second, they sat there balanced on the edge of the abyss—Caleb sitting upright, his hands gripping Grace’s shoulders, his face buried in the crook of her neck, both of them breathing in ragged, synchronized gasps.
“Can you feel the floor?” she whispered against his ear.
Caleb closed his eyes, searching the void.
At first, nothing. Just the cold absence of sensation.
Then, slowly, creeping through the soles of his feet like a thousand tiny needles piercing the skin at once, came the cold. The bitter, biting draft of the winter floorboards.
“I feel it,” he choked out. “The wood. It’s cold.”
A wild, breathless laugh escaped Grace’s throat. “Okay. Okay, that’s something. What now?”
“Stand back.”
“Caleb, you’ll drop—”
“Stand back, Grace!”
She hesitated, then slowly uncurled her fingers from his waist and stepped back two paces, her hands hovering in the air like a spotter waiting for a catastrophic fall.
Caleb placed both palms flat against the edge of the mattress.
He looked at the chrome frame of the wheelchair five feet away. Five feet. In his previous life, five feet was a single stride. It was the distance between him and a man he was about to break across a desk. Now, it looked like the width of the Atlantic Ocean.
He pushed.
His triceps screamed. His chest expanded. His upper body lifted off the mattress.
For half a second, his weight transferred downward. The sheer gravity of two hundred and ten pounds of bone and muscle slammed into his knees, his ankles, and his feet.
His right knee locked.
His left leg gave way completely.
Caleb collapsed forward with a violent, sickening crash.
He didn't hit the floor entirely—Grace lunged forward, her body slamming into his chest, her arms wrapping around his ribs, taking the brunt of his momentum. They both went down in a tangled heap on the thick Persian rug beside the bed, Grace’s back hitting the base of the nightstand with a sharp crack that knocked the wind out of her lungs.
Caleb lay on top of her, his face pressed into the carpet, his chest heaving, his left leg twisted uselessly beneath him.
Silence filled the room, heavy and terrifying.
Outside in the hallway, footsteps paused.
Caleb froze. Grace went completely rigid beneath him, her hands still locked around his biceps, her breath held in her throat.
For ten agonizing seconds, the silence stretched like a rubber band pulled to its absolute limit. Someone was standing right outside the heavy oak door. Listening.
Caleb’s eyes found the penlight on the floor. It had rolled under the bed, its faint beam illuminating the dust ruffles.
Then, the squeak of leather shoes moved on. The guard had assumed the thud was just the invalid shifting in his sleep.
Grace let out a long, trembling exhale against Caleb’s collarbone.
“You’re very heavy,” she whispered, her voice shaking with adrenaline.
Caleb didn't laugh. He couldn't. The pain radiating from his lower spine was blinding, a white-hot furnace that made his teeth chatter. But beneath the pain, something else had happened.
When his weight had hit the floor, his left quad—the leg that had given way—had fired. A violent, involuntary spasm had contracted the muscle before it buckled.
It wasn't dead.
It was just asleep. Starved of signals, drowned in poison, but intact.
“Grace,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the carpet.
“What?”
“Can you get up?”
“Not while you’re lying on top of me like a fallen oak tree, no.”
With agonizing slowness, Caleb used his forearms to lever his torso off her chest. He dragged himself backward using pure upper-body strength, scraping his knees against the wool rug until his back hit the side of the bed.
Grace sat up, rubbing her left shoulder where it had struck the nightstand. Her hair was completely loose now, tumbling down her back in dark-blond waves. Her uniform was torn at the collar, exposing the pale hollow of her throat.
She looked at him through the gloom. Her eyes were wide, fierce, and entirely devoid of fear.
“We’re going to need a better plan than throwing yourself off furniture,” she said, brushing a strand of hair from her mouth.
Caleb leaned his head back against the mattress, staring at her through the dark. He had known generals, politicians, and billionaires. He had known men who commanded armies of killers without blinking.
None of them had the quiet, terrifying spine of the woman sitting on the floor in front of him.
“How much do you know about the security system in this house?” Caleb asked.
Grace adjusted her collar. “I know Owen changed the access codes on the master server in the basement four days ago. I know because the cleaning staff couldn't get into the laundry tunnels without a physical keycard.”
“Did you get a keycard?”
A slow, dangerous smile crept across Grace’s face. She reached into her apron pocket, past the vial of poison and the plastic sports bottle, and pulled out a thin, white plastic card with a magnetic strip across the back.
“The night supervisor left his jacket in the breakroom on Monday,” she said smoothly. “He’s sixty-two, drinks too much bourbon, and assumes he dropped it behind the dryer. It’s been behind the dryer twice this week when he went looking for it.”
Caleb stared at the card.
“You stole a level-four security card from Owen’s head of perimeter defense?”
“I didn't steal it,” she corrected him. “I borrowed it. Every morning at four, I return it to his jacket pocket, and every night at eleven, I take it back out. If you clean a house for two years, Caleb, you realize very quickly that security guards are just lazy men who like carrying flashlights.”
Caleb let out a low, raspy sound that started in his chest and broke through his lips before he could stop it.
He was laughing.
A real, genuine laugh for the first time since the bullets had torn through his spine on Michigan Avenue.
“You are a menace, Grace Holloway,” he whispered.
“I’m an employee trying to make sure her employer doesn't get murdered before payday,” she replied, tucking the card back into her pocket. She leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. “Now, how do we get you back into that bed before Henderson comes back for her midnight vitals check?”
Caleb looked at the five feet between him and the mattress. His back screamed in protest. His legs were cold, vibrating with residual nerve fire.
“We don't get me back into the bed,” Caleb said, his eyes turning to flint.
Grace frowned. “What do you mean?”
“If Henderson comes back at midnight and finds me in bed, nothing changes,” Caleb’s voice was lethal, precise, calculating every move on the board three turns in advance. “Owen controls the timeline. He decides when the board meeting happens. He decides when the poison finishes me off.”
He pointed toward the heavy mahogany desk across the room.
“Open the bottom right drawer. There’s a false bottom. Press the brass screw on the inside hinge.”
Grace rose to her feet, moved silently across the carpet, and opened the drawer. She reached inside, felt for the hinge, and pressed.
A soft *click* echoed in the darkness.
She pulled the false floor away.
Inside lay a satellite phone—unregistered, encrypted with twenty-four-character rolling keys, completely independent of the estate’s fiber-optic network—and a black steel Glock 19 with two extended magazines.
Grace looked down at the weapon, then looked back at Caleb.
“Who are we calling?” she asked.
Caleb reached out, his hand steady, his fingers waiting for the phone.
May you like
“We’re calling the one man in Chicago who hates Owen Pike more than I do,” Caleb said. “And then, Grace, we’re going to burn this house down from the inside out.”
***
