Chapter 1
Every Nurse Quit His Night Shift, but the Chubby One Found the Scar Nobody Was Supposed to See
“You have five minutes to leave before he wakes up.”
The warning came from a man with a broken nose, a tailored black suit, and one hand resting under his jacket.
Nora Bennett did not stop washing her hands.
Behind her, another private nurse was already stuffing unopened gauze packets into her medical bag so quickly that half of them fell onto the marble floor.
“I’m serious,” the man said. “The last nurse lasted nine hours. The one before her lasted six. Mr. Moretti threw a lamp through a window because she touched his shoulder.”
The other nurse gave Nora a look somewhere between pity and contempt.
“Let her stay,” she muttered. “Maybe he likes the soft ones.”
Her eyes traveled deliberately over Nora’s body.
Nora was thirty-six, five-foot-six, broad through the hips, heavy in the thighs, and shaped nothing like the polished women photographed beside expensive men in downtown Chicago restaurants.
She had heard every version of the joke.
Too big for fitted scrubs.
Too slow for emergency work.
Pretty face, shame about the rest.
She had once spent an entire decade believing that if she lost another twenty pounds, spoke more softly, smiled at the right moments, and occupied less space, people might finally stop deciding what she was capable of before she opened her mouth.
Then life had taken everything else from her.
After that, being called fat had become surprisingly unimportant.
Nora dried her hands.
“What’s his temperature?”
The man blinked. “What?”
“Gabriel Moretti. Temperature.”
“Hundred and three point eight.”
“How long has it been above a hundred and three?”
“Since afternoon.”
“And nobody sent him to a hospital?”
The man laughed once, humorlessly.
“You know who he is?”
“I know he’s a patient with a fever.”
“He’s Gabriel Moretti.”
“Then Gabriel Moretti is a patient with a fever.”
For the first time, the man really looked at her.
His name was Luca Ferraro. Nora knew that much from the agency notes.
Chief of security.
Forty-one.
Former amateur boxer.
No documented medical authority.
The last point mattered most to Nora.
Luca lowered his voice.
“He won’t go to a hospital.”
“Then he can die here with a better view.”
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind them, Chicago glittered fifty-eight stories below like a field of shattered diamonds.
Gabriel Moretti’s bedroom occupied nearly half the penthouse floor. Black walnut walls. Pale stone. Original paintings. A fireplace big enough to roast an animal inside.
And in the middle of all that carefully purchased power, a thirty-nine-year-old man lay sweating through his sheets like a frightened child.
Three weeks earlier, someone had shot Gabriel outside a private restaurant.
The bullet had entered high near his left shoulder and exited without striking bone.
According to the medical report Nora had been given, he should have been walking within days.
Instead, his legs had weakened.
Then stopped working.
Then came the fever.
Then the confusion.
Then the rage.
Four nurses had quit.
The fifth was currently rushing toward the elevator.
The doors opened.
She looked back once.
“You’re insane.”
Nora checked the IV line.
“Probably.”
The elevator swallowed the woman.
Silence returned.
Luca exhaled through his nose.
“I offered to double her pay.”
“Triple mine.”
“You haven’t survived the hour.”
May you like
“Then you can save the money.”
A sound came from the bed.
