Chapter 1
For sixteen weeks, I hid a baby in cheap roadside motels, sleeping with one arm around him because a corrupt detective wanted him dead. I was just a twenty-nine-year-old nurse who had rescued him from a Chicago hospital, with no idea who his family was. Then armed men tracked us down and dragged me before Dominic Farrow, the city's most feared mafia boss. He looked at the baby in my arms and went completely still. “That's my nephew,” he whispered. But when I refused to hand the child over, Dominic asked one question that made me realize the danger was far from over.
My name is Bernie Collins. Until four months ago, I was an emergency-room nurse at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
I was quiet, hardworking, and so easily overlooked that some doctors barely remembered my name.
Then one night, everything changed.
A critically wounded woman was rushed into our emergency department with a baby wrapped inside her blood-soaked jacket.
I immediately checked the child.
He couldn't have been more than a few months old.
There was blood on his little face.
But none of it belonged to him.
As the medical team hurried his mother toward surgery, she grabbed my wrist.
“Don't let them take him.”
“Who?”
Her eyes filled with terror.
“The police. Please, don't let the police take my baby.”
Then the doors closed behind her.
Minutes later, a detective stepped into the treatment area.
He had a thin scar above his eyebrow and a pistol in his hand.
“Where's the infant?”
I moved in front of the bassinet.
“Why?”
“Evidence processing.”
Something about his voice made my stomach tighten.
Babies weren't evidence to be collected without explanation.
And nobody needed a drawn gun to question a nurse.
I glanced at his badge.
Then at the child.
I made a decision that would destroy my ordinary life.
I tucked the baby beneath a trauma blanket, slipped through a supply corridor, and disappeared into the hospital parking garage.
I didn't know his name.
I didn't know who wanted him.
But I knew his mother had been terrified.
And she never came back from surgery.
For sixteen weeks, I moved between cheap motels outside Chicago.
I used my emergency savings to buy diapers, formula, and blankets.
I slept lightly, keeping the baby close enough to feel him breathe.
Whenever headlights lingered outside our room, I packed.
Whenever a stranger asked too many questions, I left.
I became very good at disappearing.
Until the black SUVs found us.
Two men cornered me outside a roadside motel.
I fought to protect the baby.
One struck me across the jaw.
Hours later, I sat inside a dim storage room wearing dirty blue scrubs, my face bruised and my arms wrapped tightly around the little boy.
Across from me sat Dominic Farrow.
Thirty-eight years old.
Dark-haired.
Dangerously calm.
The ruthless mafia boss whose organization controlled shipping operations, construction companies, and half of Chicago's criminal underworld.
His eyes stayed on the child.
“Tell me how you got him.”
I told him everything.
The wounded woman.
The emergency department.
The detective.
The gun.
And the desperate warning I'd heard before the mother disappeared into surgery.
Dominic listened without interrupting.
Then he asked, “Did the detective have a scar above his eyebrow?”
My stomach dropped.
“Yes.”
“Did he see your hospital badge?”
I swallowed.
“My full name.”
Dominic leaned forward.
His expression changed in a way that frightened me more than his armed guards.
He knew that detective.
I could see it.
I tightened my grip around the baby.
“You're going to try to take him from me, aren't you?”
Dominic looked at his nephew, then at the bruise on my face.
“Bernie, that man has been looking for you for sixteen weeks.”
“I know.”
His voice dropped.
“No. You don't understand. He wasn't looking for the baby alone.”
I stopped breathing.
May you like
Dominic's gaze moved toward the locked door.
“He was looking for you, too.”
