Chapter 1
Six nurses had quit in five weeks, and one of them had left the mansion sobbing so hard she forgot her coat. By the time I arrived, everyone expected me to run too—but I needed the money badly enough to face a ruthless mafia boss, and before the week was over, I would do the one thing he had forbidden every nurse from doing.
The town car smelled like leather and stale cigarettes as it carried me beyond Chicago into miles of dark evergreens. My hands rested against my worn scrubs while I thought about the final notice on my kitchen counter and my younger brother Tommy lying ninety pounds thin in a hospital bed.
His leukemia had stopped responding to standard treatment.
The experimental trial that might save him cost more than I could earn in three lifetimes.
Then an anonymous caller offered me $10,000 a week in cash.
The rules were simple: live on the estate, carry no phone, ask no questions about my patient’s injuries, and ignore the armed men guarding the property.
I said yes.
A man named Leo met me outside the stone mansion.
“Your predecessor lasted two days,” he said as he led me upstairs. “The nurse before her lasted a shift and a half.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Leo stopped outside a pair of heavy doors.
“Liam Mercer hates being helpless. He’ll insult you, refuse medication, throw things.”
Then his voice lowered.
“Do your job. Don’t try to fix him. Don’t talk back.”
He paused.
“And never touch the blinds.”
“Why?”
“He wants the room dark.”
I shifted my cheap duffel higher on my shoulder.
“As long as Friday still means ten thousand dollars, he can growl all he wants.”
Leo opened the doors.
The room smelled of iodine, sweat, and infected flesh.
From the darkness came a voice rough enough to scrape skin.
“Tell her to leave.”
Leo looked at me once, then shut the door behind him.
I switched on a lamp.
A glass exploded against the wall beside my head.
Liam Mercer lay in the enormous bed, bruised and pale, his right leg trapped inside an external fixator, metal pins drilled into bone. Heavy abdominal bandages were already bleeding through.
“Turn that light off.”
“No.”
His icy blue eyes narrowed.
“I need to inspect your wound.”
“Get out.”
I washed my hands instead.
“From the smell, you’re developing an infection. So unless dying dramatically is part of your schedule, I’m changing that dressing.”
When I peeled the gauze back, the skin beneath it was angry red and beginning to rot.
Liam grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t touch me.”
“You’re cutting off circulation.”
His grip tightened.
“I said don’t.”
I met his stare.
“If I leave that tissue untreated, bacteria enter your bloodstream and you die.”
I leaned closer.
“And I need you alive until Friday.”
Something shifted in his expression.
Slowly, he released me.
I cleaned the wound, started antibiotics, checked every pin in his leg, and sat in the corner with a paperback.
“Turn the light off.”
“When I finish the chapter.”
For the first time in five weeks, nobody ran from Liam Mercer’s room.
By day four, he had stopped throwing things.
Instead, he punished me with silence.
“Pain from one to ten?” I asked, holding his morphine.
Nothing.
I stared at him.
“Fine. You can be stubborn in pain.”
His jaw flexed, but he still refused to answer.
That afternoon, I noticed something I had missed before.
Every time sunlight slipped through the tiny gap between the curtains, Liam turned his face toward it.
Not away.
Toward it.
I looked at the sealed blinds.
Then at him.
“Don’t,” he said quietly.
May you like
It was the first word he had spoken to me in hours.
My hand closed around the cord anyway.
