Chapter 6
Adrien Voss had never been good at waiting.
He paced. Sat. Stood. Sat again.
Lily remained curled in a plastic chair in her birthday dress.
Every few minutes, she repeated the words Clare had whispered to her.
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m here.”
Hours passed.
Maya learned the woman’s name.
Clare Bennett.
She lived in Queens.
Her parents had died when she was 17.
She had no husband and no partner.
There was a child.
Noah Bennett.
Her 8-year-old brother.
The boy in the photograph.
Then Maya’s voice changed.
Noah was sick.
He had a serious heart condition and needed surgery. Clare had been trying to pay for it for years. There were denied loans and medical debt everywhere Maya looked.
Clare had been drowning.
Adrien thought about a little girl in a hospital 20 years earlier, when he himself had been young, poor, and powerless, before the empire and before the name people whispered.
He had buried that memory with everything else soft inside him.
Now it had returned.
Noah was staying with an older neighbor named Mrs. Alvarez.
Adrien initially wanted him told what had happened.
Maya stopped him.
No 8-year-old child with a bad heart needed to hear over the phone in the middle of the night that his sister had taken a blade meant for a stranger.
They would wait until Clare was stable.
At the fourth hour, the surgeon emerged.
Clare was alive.
It had been close. A few more minutes and the conversation would have been very different.
But she was stable.
She would have a difficult recovery, but she was going to live.
Even as she surfaced from anesthesia, she kept asking for Noah.
Adrien closed his eyes.
Of course she did.
He asked to see her.
Normally, the surgeon said, only family could enter.
Adrien looked at her.
“She doesn’t have family except a boy who can’t be here.”
He was paying for everything.
The best treatment available.
Whatever Clare needed, for however long she needed it.
The surgeon allowed him 5 minutes.
Clare was barely awake when he entered.
She looked impossibly small in the hospital bed.
When she recognized him, she remembered him only as the man sitting beside the girl.
“The girl is my sister,” Adrien said. “Her name is Lily. You saved her life.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. She’s not hurt at all because of you.”
“Good.”
Then Clare remembered Noah.
Panic arrived instantly.
She tried to sit up.
The monitors protested.
Adrien put the lightest pressure on her shoulder.
“Stop. Listen to me. Noah is safe. He’s with Mrs. Alvarez. He’s asleep. He’s fine.”
Clare stared at him.
“How do you know his name? How do you know about Mrs. Alvarez?”
Adrien saw the fear.
A powerful man knowing details about her little brother could mean only danger in the world Clare understood.
He told her the truth.
He had ordered someone to find out who she was after she saved Lily.
Nobody was going near Noah.
Nobody would touch him.
Then Adrien returned the photograph that had fallen from her apron.
Clare looked at Noah’s gap-toothed smile and began to cry.
She told Adrien what she had thought while lying on the restaurant floor.
Who would take care of Noah?
Who would give him his medicine?
He hid it under his tongue and spat it out. Only Clare could make him take it.
“I can’t die,” she whispered. “I’m not allowed to die. There’s no one else.”
Adrien had listened to men beg for their lives without feeling anything.
This was different.
Clare was not frightened of dying for herself.
She was frightened because a little boy might have nobody left to give him his medicine.
“You’re not going to die,” Adrien said. “You’re going to live, and you’re going to get strong, and you’re going to give your brother his medicine yourself every morning for a very long time.”
Then he told her Noah would get his surgery.
The surgery the banks had refused to finance.
May you like
The best surgeon in the country.
Everything had already been arranged.
