Chapter 1 - The Penthouse of the Condemned
Four nurses had already fled the glass-walled penthouse before the grandfather clock struck midnight.
The fifth was frantically stuffing sterilized gauze and silver surgical instruments into her leather bag.
Downstairs, the glittering expanse of Chicago stretched out like a galaxy of indifferent stars.
Up here, the air smelled of stale sweat, expensive bourbon, and approaching death.
Security had stopped me by the private elevator bank to deliver a blunt warning.
They told me that Chicago’s most feared mafia boss might snap my neck the exact second he regained consciousness.
I didn’t blink.
I kept washing my hands under the cold porcelain faucet, letting the antimicrobial soap foam over my knuckles.
The fifth nurse rushed past me, her eyes wide with a terror that only months of surviving the underworld could breed.
“The last girl lasted nine hours before she bolted,” she whispered, grabbing my arm.
“The one before her barely made it six.”
I shook her hand off my sleeve with clinical indifference.
“Mr. Moretti threw a heavy brass lamp straight through a reinforced window because a timid girl touched his shoulder,” she continued.
I turned off the faucet and reached for a paper towel.
“Maybe she had terrible bedside manner,” I replied evenly.
The nurse looked me over, noting my height, my athletic build, and my unnerving calm.
She let out a hollow, exhausted laugh.
“Let her stay then,” she muttered to the shadows.
“Maybe she’ll have better luck in hell.”
The private elevator doors swallowed her up, leaving me alone with the chief of security.
His name was Luca Ferraro.
He was forty-one years old, carried the smashed nose of a former amateur boxer, and wore a tailored black suit that strained against his thick chest.
His right hand rested heavy and deliberate beneath his left jacket lapel.
“You haven’t even survived an hour in this tomb,” Luca said, his voice flat.
“Then you’re wasting your boss's money keeping me around,” I said.
“What’s his temperature?”
Luca blinked, momentarily thrown off by my clinical pivot.
“What?”
“Gabriel Moretti,” I repeated.
“What is his current core temperature?”
“One hundred and three point eight.”
“And for how many hours has it hovered there?”
“Since early this afternoon.”
“And not a single person in this penthouse had the basic medical competence to send him to an emergency room?”
Luca let out a harsh, humorless bark of laughter.
“You clearly have no idea who is lying in that master bed.”
“I know a human body when I see one,” I answered, tossing my paper towel into the bin.
“And right now, that body is hosting a massive, unchecked systemic infection.”
“He’s Gabriel Moretti,” Luca growled, as if the name were a magic shield against bacteria.
“Then Gabriel Moretti is a patient with a dangerous fever,” I countered.
For the first time since I stepped off the elevator, Luca Ferraro truly looked at me.
He saw thirty-six years of compressed frustration, unyielding resilience, and the steady, unshakeable hands of a trauma nurse who had seen emperors and outlaws bleed out on cold linoleum floors.
“He refuses to set foot in a hospital,” Luca admitted, his jaw tightening.
“Then he can die right here with a breathtaking panoramic view of Lake Michigan,” I said.
Three weeks prior, Gabriel Moretti had taken a bullet just outside an exclusive downtown supper club.
Official reports stated the projectile entered near his left clavicle and exited cleanly without fracturing bone.
By all medical logic, he should have been back running his empire within days.
Instead, his legs had mysteriously weakened.
Within a week, they stopped working entirely.
Then came the erratic spikes in fever.
Then the terrifying cognitive lapses.
Then the blind, animalistic rage that had driven every frightened nurse away.
A guttural growl tore through the heavy silence of the hallway.
Gabriel Moretti was awake.
No glossy magazine profile or grainy police surveillance photo could have prepared me for the sheer physical presence of him.
He was thirty-nine, possessing a powerful frame, broad shoulders, scarred knuckles, and damp black hair plastered to his forehead.
He possessed the undeniable physique of a man who ruled through calculated terror.
Yet his face was the ash-gray color of a fresh corpse.
His pupils were dilated to the edges of his irises, swallowing the brown.
His chest stuttered with dangerously shallow, rattling breaths.
Before I could take another step toward the master bedroom, his hand shot out across the sheets.
His iron fingers locked around my wrist with enough kinetic force to fracture my bones.
Luca immediately dropped his stance, his hand dipping deeper beneath his jacket holster.
“Don’t move an inch,” I snapped at Luca without breaking eye contact with the dying mob boss.
Gabriel squeezed harder, his tendons standing out like steel cables.
“Who sent you?” Gabriel rasped, his voice sounding like grinding stones.
“My employment agency,” I replied, my pulse remaining stubbornly steady.
“Who?”
“Midwest Private Care.”
“You’re lying.”
“You’re delirious.”
His fingers dug deeper into my flesh, threatening to bruise every capillary.
“You smell entirely like hospital antiseptic.”
“I am an emergency room nurse,” I said coldly.
“It would be profoundly concerning if I smelled like cheap perfume or gasoline.”
A flicker of utter confusion momentarily pierced through the murderous fury in his eyes.
“Listen to me very carefully,” I whispered, leaning in closer.
“Your resting heart rate is sitting at one hundred and forty beats per minute.”
“Your blood oxygen is hovering at a catastrophic eighty-six.”
“And your raging fever is currently cooking whatever remaining judgment you have in that stubborn skull.”
“You can crush my wrist into powder, or you can give me ten minutes to figure out why your organs are shutting down.”
Something profoundly strange shifted deep within his dark gaze.
It wasn't trust.
It was sheer, undeniable curiosity.
Slowly, agonizingly, his grip slackened.
He released my wrist.
Luca stared from the doorway, his mouth slightly parted.
“He... he never lets go once he grabs someone,” Luca whispered.
May you like
“Everybody lets go eventually,” I replied, rolling my bruised wrist.
“Physics always wins in the end.”
