Chapter 2 - The Ghost of the Past Awakens When Sloan Recognizes the Hands That Saved His Sister Belong to His Missing Wife
The chaotic shouting in the hallway faded into the background as Delphine pressed her fingertips harder into Cora’s wrist, monitoring the sluggish, erratic rhythm of the girl’s pulse.
The epinephrine was a powerful, life-saving drug, but in cases of profound systemic shock, a single dose sometimes struggled against a relentless allergen.
Cora’s skin had taken on a terrifying, translucent gray pallor that signaled oxygen starvation in the peripheral tissues.
“Her blood pressure is dropping,” Delphine muttered to herself, her brows furrowed in intense professional concentration as she calculated dosages in her head.
Sloan leaned in closer, his broad shoulders shielding them both from the watchful eyes of his heavily armed subordinates.
“What do you need?” he demanded, his voice stripped of its usual terrifying mob-boss authority, leaving only the raw, fracturing desperation of an older brother watching his only surviving family slip away.
“I need the second auto-injector from her bag,” Delphine replied instantly, her eyes never leaving Cora’s cyanotic lips.
“It didn’t work?” Sloan’s hand jerked toward the designer purse with violent urgency.
“It slowed the reaction, but her baseline inflammation is too aggressive. We need a secondary dose to sustain vasodilation control before her blood pressure bottoms out completely.”
Sloan unzipped the pouch, his large, calloused fingers—fingers that had signed execution orders and brokered multi-million-dollar arms deals—fumbling clumsily with the small plastic case inside.
He pulled the second orange device free and thrust it toward Delphine’s waiting hand.
As their fingers brushed against one another in the dimly lit room, a sudden, violent jolt seemed to pass through Sloan’s entire frame.
He froze mid-movement.
His dark, penetrating eyes shot upward from Cora’s face to lock onto the side of Delphine’s profile.
The harsh, golden lighting of the Copper Lantern private room caught the subtle curve of her jawline, the specific slope of her nose, and the unique, tiny birthmark nestled just beneath her left earlobe—a mark he had traced a thousand times in the dark during their tempestuous, short-lived marriage.
“Delphine?” Sloan whispered, the name tearing itself out of his throat like jagged glass.
Delphine didn’t stop moving; she ripped the safety cap off the second injector with her teeth, her focus entirely locked on saving the dying girl on the floor.
“Hold her leg still, Sloan. Right now,” she ordered coldly, her voice entirely devoid of personal recognition.
“Damn it, look at me!” Sloan roared, his massive hand shooting out to grab Delphine firmly by her slender wrist, stopping the injection mid-air.
The entire room went dead silent once more, every bodyguard instinctively reaching for their firearms at their boss's sudden outburst.
“If you let go of my wrist to play games, your sister dies of cerebral hypoxia within sixty seconds,” Delphine hissed, turning her head to glare at him with eyes burning with a fury so intense it momentarily silenced the king of the underworld.
“You died,” Sloan breathed, his chest heaving as he stared into the face of the woman he had mourned, hunted for, and secretly wept over for three agonizing years.
“I walked away from a monster who suffocated my soul,” Delphine fired back without blinking an eyelash, her voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register that only he could hear.
“Now let go of my arm so I can save her life, or you can explain to your dead parents why you let their daughter die over a grudge.”
The sheer venom and clinical precision in her tone shattered Sloan’s cognitive paralysis.
With a guttural curse, he released her wrist instantly, grabbing Cora’s leg with twice the previous force.
Delphine slammed the second auto-injector into Cora’s outer thigh.
Click.
She held it firmly for three steady seconds, watching the mechanical indicator window turn red.
She withdrew the device and immediately placed her palm flat against Cora’s sternum, feeling for the internal rebound.
Ten agonizing seconds passed.
Then, a ragged, shuddering gasp tore violently from Cora’s throat.
The young girl coughed violently, her back arching off the floor as fresh oxygen flooded her starved lungs.
A harsh, wet wheeze rattled in her chest, followed immediately by a loud, sputtering intake of air that sounded like music to Delphine’s exhausted ears.
“She’s turning,” Delphine breathed, her own shoulders slumping in sudden, overwhelming relief as a thin film of sweat broke out across her forehead.
Cora’s eyelids fluttered open, revealing unfocused, terrified hazel eyes.
“S… Sloan?” the girl managed to whisper, her voice raspy and weak.
“I’m right here, sweetheart. I’ve got you,” Sloan murmured, his voice cracking with an emotion his men had never, in all their years of service, heard him express.
He kept one arm securely around his sister while his burning, obsessive gaze remained locked entirely on Delphine, who was already packing the used medical devices back into the leather pouch.
“The paramedics are entering through the service alley now, boss!” the enforcer by the door yelled over the comms.
“Get them in here through the side entrance without letting anyone else in the restaurant see what happened,” Sloan commanded, never breaking eye contact with his estranged wife.
“Yes, sir!”
Delphine stood up slowly from the floor, brushing the dust and shattered crystal fragments from the knees of her plain black waitress trousers.
Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, not from the medical emergency, but from the terrifying reality that her three-year sanctuary of invisibility had just been obliterated in less than three minutes.
She turned toward the door, her posture stiff and resolute.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Sloan demanded, rising to his full, towering height as the paramedics rushed into the private room with a stretcher.
“Back to my station, Mr. Marchetti,” Delphine replied flatly, refusing to look back at him.
“My shift doesn’t end for another four hours, and I have tables waiting.”
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“You aren’t going back to carry trays in this hellhole,” Sloan growled, taking a heavy step forward, his authority returning with a vengeance.
“Try and stop me, and I’ll walk out of this building and never give you or your family another medical second,” she retorted over her shoulder, slipping past the rushing paramedics into the dimly lit hallway before he could utter another word.
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