Chapter 4 - THE MAN AT THE DOOR
I have never felt a room go as cold as that hospital hallway.
Victor Hale didn’t blink. He didn’t stammer. He simply let his smile soften into something almost apologetic, the way a man might smile at an old acquaintance he hadn’t expected to meet.
“A long time ago, boss,” he said smoothly. “Miss Torres worked for a family friend of mine. A housekeeper. I recognized her face at the gala last spring, and I assumed she wouldn’t remember.” He lifted both palms. “I should have said something. Forgive me.”
He touched his cuff again.
Kieran’s gaze moved from Victor’s hand to his face. His expression gave nothing away. After six years in his house, I had learned how to read that blank stare, and it frightened me more than shouting.
“Victor,” he said evenly. “I need you to handle something for me. The Dominguez shipment. Personally. Today.”
“Of course. But if there’s a problem—”
“There isn’t. Go.”
Victor hesitated for half a second. Then he nodded, his smile still in place, and walked back into the elevator. As the doors closed, his eyes met mine through the narrowing gap.
There was no warmth in them at all.
Kieran waited until the numbers over the elevator began to fall.
“That’s him,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“The watch. The cuff.” My voice shook. “And the way he said my name. He said it exactly the same way six years ago.”
Kieran did not answer. He looked past me, down the long hallway, and I saw a lifetime of loyalty fall apart behind his eyes.
“He identified Julian’s remains,” he said, almost to himself. “He stood beside me at the morgue. He held my arm.”
“Kieran—”
“Not yet.” He turned to me, and the cold had hardened into purpose. “Right now, I need two things. Jules gets the best care this city has ever seen, and Victor doesn’t learn what we know. Can you help me with that?”
I nodded.
They drew his blood at six that morning. By noon, Dr. Kim called us into a small office with a trembling smile and said the preliminary markers looked promising. A half-match. Not perfect, but good enough for the transplant team to plan around, if the family could do it within three weeks.
Kieran signed every form without reading a single page.
That afternoon, he did something I had never seen him do. He sat on the edge of my son’s bed, still wearing his black shirt and his dangerous face, and let a five-year-old teach him how to draw a stegosaurus.
I watched from the corner and felt something inside me crack and heal at the same time.
By nightfall, Jules was asleep, and Kieran had arranged a guard of three men he trusted without question. Tommy Brennan, his head of security, a gray-haired ex-cop who had known Kieran since he was a teenager, sat outside the door like a bulldog.
I stayed in the chair beside the bed. Kieran stayed in the chair across from me.
We didn’t talk for a long time.
“Our last conversation was an argument,” he said at last, quietly, so as not to wake Jules. “Julian came to my office the night he died. He told me he wanted out. He said he was tired of the violence. I told him you don’t walk away from this family.”
“Oh, Kieran.”
“He said, ‘Then I’ll walk away from you.’” He stared at the floor. “Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. And I let him leave.”
I crossed the room and sat beside him. I didn’t say anything. I just took his huge, scarred hand between mine.
He looked down at our hands for a long time.
“Thank you,” he said hoarsely, “for giving him a son who looks exactly like him.”
We sat like that until midnight, two exhausted people holding the same broken piece of the past.
At 2:14 A.M., the monitor beside Jules’s bed began to scream.
I was on my feet before I knew I was moving. The green lines on the screen had collapsed into jagged spikes. My son’s small chest jerked once, twice, and then went still.
“Jules!”
Nurses flooded the room. Dr. Kim ran in with her stethoscope swinging. “His potassium is spiking,” someone shouted. “Check the line!”
Kieran caught me around the waist as I lunged forward and held me against his chest while I fought him.
“Let go! That’s my baby, let me go!”
“Let them work,” he said into my hair, his voice shaking. “Saraphina. Let them work.”
Dr. Kim ripped the IV bag from its hook and held it up to the light. Her face went white.
“This isn’t the bag we hung,” she said. “Someone replaced it.”
Kieran went rigid behind me.
Outside the door, I heard Tommy Brennan shouting, and boots pounding down the corridor, and the elevator bell ringing again and again.
Someone had walked into my son’s room while we were sitting a few feet away, and tried to kill him.
May you like
And my son was still not breathing.
Read Chapter 5 to find out whether Jules survives—and what Kieran does to the man who tried to take him.
