“Your uncle is dead?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Sebastian looked at me.
I understood then not to ask again.
Gabriel’s phone buzzed. He checked it, and his face hardened.
“Boss.”
Sebastian turned.
Gabriel lowered his voice, but not enough. “Dr. Voss is in the city.”
The name struck the room like a match.
Sebastian went very still.
“When?”
“Tonight. He landed at Midway forty minutes ago.”
“Where is he going?”
Gabriel hesitated. “Here.”
No one moved for half a second.
Then the mansion became a machine.
Men spoke into radios. Footsteps thundered above us. Someone drew curtains. Someone else killed the lights in the hallway outside the bedroom. The fire became the only warm thing in the room.
I backed toward the wall. “Who is Dr. Voss?”
Sebastian’s face had become unreadable.
“The man who told me I would never walk again.”
My mouth went dry.
“And he’s coming here tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Sebastian’s eyes slid to his foot.
“Because someone told him I moved.”
The answer chilled me more than any threat.
Only the people in this room had seen it.
I turned slowly.
Gabriel. The guards. The nurse. The silent men by the door.
One of them had already sent word.
Sebastian seemed to reach the same conclusion. He did not raise his voice.
“Phones on the table.”
Every man obeyed.
Almost every man.
The nurse moved too late.
A young woman with pale hair and steady hands, she reached into her pocket while everyone else was still placing their devices on the polished wood desk. Gabriel saw it first.
“Stop.”
She ran.
The bedroom erupted.
A guard blocked the door, but she was fast. Too fast. She ducked beneath his arm and drove a syringe into his thigh. He collapsed before he could shout.
Gabriel lunged. She threw the tray at his face. Metal instruments scattered across the marble floor like silver insects.
I stumbled backward.
Sebastian’s chair hummed forward, blocking her path with impossible speed. She skidded, trapped between him and the fireplace.
For one breath, their eyes met.
“Who sent you?” Sebastian asked.
The nurse smiled.
Then she looked at me.
Not at him.
At me.
“Ask your husband.”
She bit down on something.
Gabriel slammed into her, forcing her mouth open, but it was too late. Her body convulsed once, twice, then went limp on the floor.
I covered my mouth.
The room froze around the dead woman.
Sebastian looked at me.
The message had landed exactly where it was meant to.
Ask your husband.
“My ex-husband,” I whispered.
But no one cared about the distinction.
Gabriel wiped blood from his lip. “She’s dead.”
Sebastian did not look away from me. “Search her.”
A guard knelt, checked the nurse’s pockets, and removed a small black transmitter no bigger than a coin. He handed it to Gabriel.
Gabriel examined it. “Active.”
“How long?” Sebastian asked.
“Could’ve been transmitting all night.”
The mansion suddenly felt transparent, every wall made of glass.
I thought of Oliver sleeping in our apartment. His dinosaur blanket tucked under his chin. The oxygen machine humming beside his bed.
“My son,” I said.
Gabriel was already dialing. He listened, then stiffened.
“What?” I demanded.
He looked at Sebastian.
That was the worst answer.
Sebastian’s voice turned deadly soft. “Say it.”
“The man outside her building isn’t responding.”
I moved before anyone could stop me.
I ran for the door.
Two guards blocked me. I shoved at them uselessly, screaming Oliver’s name, clawing against suits and muscle and guns. Gabriel caught my shoulders.
“Claire. Claire!”
“Let me go!”
“We’re going now,” he said. “But you need to breathe.”
I almost laughed at the cruelty of that word.
Breathe.
My whole life had become that word.
Oliver breathing. Oliver not breathing. Oliver fighting through another night while adults lied, left, and took whatever they wanted.
I looked at Sebastian.
His face had changed again.
Not pity.
Recognition.
He knew what it meant to be trapped in a body while someone else decided the terms of survival.
“Bring the car,” he said.
Gabriel hesitated. “Boss, Voss is coming here.”
“Let him come.”
“We can’t leave you exposed.”
Sebastian’s eyes flashed. “I said bring the car.”
Within minutes, I was in the back of a black SUV, no blindfold this time. Sebastian sat beside me, his wheelchair locked into a system built into the vehicle floor. Gabriel rode up front, speaking in low, brutal fragments into a secure phone.
Chicago streaked past in wet neon smears.
I pressed my hands together so tightly my fingers hurt.
Sebastian watched me.
“He has doctors?” he asked.
“Oliver?”
“Yes.”
“Pulmonologist. Immunologist. Emergency team at Mercy.”
“Good?”
I gave him a sharp look. “Good enough to keep him alive. Not rich enough to make miracles.”
He accepted that without offense.
Rain hammered the roof.
Gabriel ended one call and started another. “No sign of forced entry yet. Neighbor heard nothing. Elevators running. Building cameras down.”
My heart nearly stopped.
“Cameras down?”
Gabriel looked back at me. “We don’t know anything yet.”
But he did.
They all did.
Sebastian’s hand rested on the armrest. Calm. Still.
Only his thumb moved, rubbing once over the side of his chair.
At my building, two of Sebastian’s men were already outside. One lay on the pavement near the alley, alive but bleeding from the scalp. The other stood by the entrance with a gun hidden beneath his coat, his face grim.
I was out of the SUV before it fully stopped.
“Oliver!”
Gabriel caught up with me at the stairs. “Stay behind me.”
I did not.
I climbed three flights faster than I ever had in my life.
My apartment door stood open.
The oxygen machine was still humming.
The dinosaur blanket was on the floor.
Oliver was gone.
For a moment, the world made no sound.
Not the rain.
Not Gabriel shouting orders.
Not my own breath tearing in and out of my chest.
I walked into the room like a sleepwalker and picked up the blanket. It was still warm.
Sebastian entered behind me in his chair, maneuvering through the narrow doorway with cold precision. His presence filled my shabby apartment in a way that made the peeling paint and cheap furniture seem even more fragile.
On Oliver’s pillow sat a folded piece of paper.
