Chapter 1 - The Woman on the Gurney
The VIP wing of Northwestern Memorial was quiet the way expensive rooms are quiet—thick carpet, sealed windows, the faint chemical sweetness of floor wax laid over the older smell of antiseptic and other people's fear. At twenty past eight on the third of September, Dominic Valente sat in a plush waiting chair with his back to the corridor and his hands wrapped around the fingers of a woman who was not his wife.
Serena Hayes complained about the lights.
They're giving me a migraine, she said. Don't they have anything warmer? This is supposed to be the best hospital in the city.
Dominic did not look up at the lights. He looked at her hand, small and manicured, lying in his two heavy ones, and he rubbed his thumb across her knuckles the way he had once rubbed a spot on a trigger before a hard job.
You're dehydrated, he said. They'll move you in an hour.
I hate it here. She shifted against the pillows and the IV line pulled. Can you ask them for the other room? The one with the window.
There is no other room.
There's always another room for you.
He smiled at that, because it was true, and because she had said it the way she said everything—lightly, expecting the world to fold. She was twenty-four. She had come out of a party at the Peninsula at two in the morning with a racing heart and no water in her body and a photographer waiting in the lobby, and she had called him, and he had come. That was the whole of it. That was the whole of her.
Two of his men stood in the corridor, one at each end, hands folded, not looking at anyone. A nurse had already learned not to meet his eyes. The floor had gone quiet around him in the particular way a floor goes quiet around a man who owns the building's mortgage and half the people in it.
Dominic felt powerful. That was the truth of it, and he knew it, and he did not mind knowing it.
He had everything a man in his position could want. A sprawling empire that moved through the ports and the wards and the union halls of Chicago. A beautiful woman who adored him and asked nothing of him that cost anything. And back at the house in Lake Forest, behind the gates and the cameras and the two men who walked the grounds at night, a wife.
Her name was Clara Lombardi. She had been Clara Valente for five years.
It had been an alliance before it was a marriage—two families, two sets of ledgers, a union forged in blood and ink across a table in a restaurant that no longer existed. Dominic had understood that going in. What he had not understood, or had not bothered to learn, was the woman inside the contract.
Clara was everything a wife in his world was supposed to be. Quiet. Elegant. Fiercely loyal. Invisible when she needed to be. She managed the estates and the staff and the political dinners, and she never once asked him where he went at night. She never once raised her voice. She never once stood in a doorway and demanded to be seen.
Dominic had mistaken her stillness for coldness. He had mistaken her loyalty for a lack of passion. Because she never demanded his attention, he had stopped giving it to her entirely, and he had gone looking for the other thing—the loud thing, the volatile thing, the thing that made a man feel like a man.
Serena pulled at his hand.
Dom. Are you going to stay with me tonight?
Of course, baby. He brushed a blonde curl off her forehead. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere.
His phone lay face down on the table beside the chair. At seven that morning, Clara had sent him a message. Dinner at eight? I'll cook. He had read it in the car and had not answered, because he had been late for Serena and because Clara never minded, and because an unanswered message from his wife had never once cost him anything.
He did not think about the message now. He thought about the sound of Serena's laugh, which was bright and empty and required nothing of him.
Then the corridor broke.
Code red. Incoming trauma. Out of the way—move, move, move.
The double doors at the far end of the wing slammed open hard enough to hit the walls. Six people came through them at a run—paramedics, a trauma nurse, a resident—all of them shouting over each other, and the squeak of a gurney wheel echoed off the sealed windows like a heartbeat that had gotten loose from a chest.
Dominic barely looked up. Gunshot wounds and crushed bodies were a regular Tuesday in his line of work. He had been in this hospital twice for his own men. He had paid for this wing.
But the gurney came past the glass of Serena's suite, and something in the corner of his vision caught—a flash of green.
Emerald green. Silk.
His breath stopped in his throat.
He had bought Clara that dress for her birthday last month. It had come from a shop on Oak Street that kept the door locked and buzzed you in. She had worn it that morning, at breakfast, because she had said she had an errand to run in the city and wanted to look like herself.
He was standing before he knew he had decided to stand. The chair shrieked against the floor. He dropped Serena's hand—he did not even feel his fingers open—and he heard her say his name behind him, confused, and he did not turn around.
He stepped out into the corridor.
The gurney was rolling past him, close enough to touch.
Time did the thing it does at the worst moments, the thing that makes a second last a minute and a minute last an hour. The clean hospital air was gone, replaced by the heavy copper stench of fresh blood. He saw a pale, slender arm hanging off the side of the rail, and on the third finger of that arm, a diamond wedding band glittering under the hard white lights, mocking him.
He looked at the face on the pillow.
It was bruised. It was cut. There was glass in it—small bright pieces caught in the hairline and the cheek—and there was blood everywhere, in the hair and over the mouth and down the throat, so much that for a moment his mind refused the shape beneath it.
But beneath the blood, beneath the ruin, was the face he had woken up beside for five years.
It was Clara.
She was alone. No detail man. No bodyguards. No family. Just strangers in blue, pressing gauze against her chest, shouting numbers at each other, moving her toward the doors at the end of the hall.
Dominic heard his own voice come out of him, and it did not sound like his voice at all.
Clara.
The word had no power in it. That was the thing that shocked him most in the first second—that the name came out small, stripped, like a man calling into a well.
Then the nurse hit him in the chest with her forearm.
Sir, step back—
May you like
He caught the rail of the gurney with both hands.
That's my wife. ..................................... Type '𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓'to view the full story. I’ll 'like' your comment once the link to the full post is published. If you need to find the full post within the comments section, try this: go to the comments, select 'Most relevant' and switch to 'All comments'—then look for the 'blue text', click on it, and you will be directed to the full post.
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