Chapter 1 - The Woman Behind the Maternity Doors
The maternity doors burst open before I understood why every nurse in the corridor had started running.
“Blood pressure dropping!”
“Thirty-eight weeks!”
“Cardiology is meeting us upstairs!”
A gurney shot past me.
Then I saw her face.
Brin Holloway.
For nine months, I had forced myself not to say her name.
Now she was three feet away, pale beneath fluorescent lights, dark hair stuck to her forehead, an oxygen mask covering her mouth. One hand clutched the rail.
The other protected a stomach that was unmistakably, impossibly pregnant.
My child.
I knew before anyone told me.
Nine months earlier, Brin had lived above Vesper Row, the nightclub I owned on Chicago’s West Side. She tended bar downstairs and laughed at men who tried to impress her with money.
Including me.
I had spent twenty years becoming the kind of man Chicago feared.
Brin had needed twenty minutes to stop caring.
Then someone photographed us together.
The photograph reached one of my rivals.
I panicked.
Not because I was ashamed of her.
Because suddenly Brin had become leverage.
So I went upstairs one night and destroyed the only thing I actually wanted.
“You don’t belong in my world.”
She stared at me for a long time.
Then she said, “Don’t pretend cowardice is protection, Cormack.”
I left anyway.
Now nurses were rushing her toward emergency surgery carrying my unborn child.
“Boss?”
Royce stood beside me.
“That’s Brin from Vesper Row.”
“No one goes near her.”
He frowned.
“No questions. No calls. Nobody says her name until I know what happened.”
Behind us, Yara Salcedo rose from the waiting-room chair.
She had brought me here because of abdominal pain she described as unbearable until Brin appeared.
Then Yara seemed perfectly capable of standing.
She grabbed my sleeve.
“Tell me that bartender isn’t carrying your bastard.”
I looked at her hand.
“Take it off me.”
Her fingers immediately released.
Yara was the daughter of Rafael Salcedo, whose alliance with my organization had kept Chicago from becoming a battlefield for five years.
Our families expected us to marry.
I had never promised that.
Yara apparently had.
“You’re embarrassing me,” she whispered.
“She may be dying.”
“And?”
One word.
That was all it took.
I walked away from her.
At the nurses’ station, a silver-haired woman looked up.
“The patient who just came through. Brin Holloway.”
“Are you family?”
The question cut deeper than anything Yara could have said.
“I may be the father.”
The nurse’s expression changed.
Then she reached beneath the counter.
“There’s something Ms. Holloway left for you.”
She placed a sealed gray folder between us.
My full legal name was written across it in Brin’s handwriting.
Cormack Elias Hale.
Beneath it:
If I don’t make it.
Behind me, Yara took one involuntary step backward.
May you like
And suddenly I stopped looking at the folder.
I looked at her.
