Chapter 3 - The Price of Vengeance
The waiting room of the maternity ward had transformed into an armed encampment within twenty minutes.
Royce stood by the elevator bank, his massive shoulders blocking access to the corridor, his hand resting casually inside his jacket where a suppressed Sig Sauer rested against his ribs. Two more of Cormack’s senior enforcers—men with broken noses and tailored suits that couldn't hide their street-fighter posture—flanked the double doors. Nurses walked past them with wide eyes, whispering to each other, clutching their clipboards like shields against the sudden influx of dangerous, heavy-set men who looked like they owned the city block.
Inside the small, private consultation room adjacent to the surgical suite, Cormack sat in a molded plastic chair that was entirely too small for his frame. He hadn't touched his phone in twenty minutes. The screen was dark, displaying his reflection—a hard, lined face with shadows beneath the eyes that had nothing to do with lack of sleep and everything to do with ghosts he thought he had buried nine months ago in an alley behind Vesper Row.
The door clicked open.
Dr. Vance walked in, looking like he had just survived a bomb blast. His scrubs were stained with a dark, rust-colored splash of arterial blood across the chest. He pulled off his latex gloves with a sharp snap and dropped them into the waste bin by the door.
Cormack stood up so fast his chair screeched against the linoleum. "And?"
"The baby is out," Dr. Vance said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. "A girl. Three pounds, eleven ounces. Premature, obviously, but she's crying. We've got her in the neonatal intensive care unit right now under respiratory support. Her lungs are underdeveloped, but she's fighting."
Cormack’s breath hitched—a micro-movement, a tiny fracture in his armor that only someone who knew him for a decade would have caught. "And Brin?"
Dr. Vance lowered his hands. His expression was heavy, weighed down by the impossible mathematics of emergency medicine.
"She flatlined right as we clamped the umbilical cord," the doctor said quietly. "Her heart simply gave up the fight. The peripartum cardiomyopathy had progressed too far; her cardiac muscle was like wet tissue paper. We ran code protocols for twenty-four minutes. Epinephrine, defibrillation, manual cardiac massage by the surgical resident. We got a faint, erratic rhythm back about three minutes ago, but she's on total life support. ECMO machine is doing the breathing and the pumping for her right now."
Cormack felt the room tilt. The air turned heavy, thick as liquid lead.
"Take me in to see her," Cormack demanded.
"Mr. Hale, you can't just—"
"I own the biomedical wing of this hospital, Dr. Vance," Cormack lied with absolute, terrifying conviction. "Every piece of diagnostic machinery humming in this building was purchased with a grant bearing my family's name. You are going to put me in a sterile gown, scrub my hands, and walk me through those double doors right now."
Three minutes later, Cormack stood in the chilled, sterile silence of Intensive Care Box 3.
The room smelled of antiseptic, ozone, and the distinct, coppery tang of human blood. Brin Holloway lay in the center of the adjustable bed, surrounded by a forest of clear plastic tubing, wires, and blinking monitors. A thick, clear endotracheal tube ran down her throat, taped securely to her pale, bruised cheek, connected to a mechanical ventilator that hissed rhythmically: inhale, pause, exhale.
Her black hair, usually tied back in a messy bun when she was wiping down the sticky mahogany bar at Vesper Row, was splayed across the white pillow like spilled ink. Her face was hollowed out, her cheekbones sharp as glass shards. The woman who had laughed at his bad jokes while pouring double bourbons on rainy Tuesday nights was gone, replaced by a fragile shell kept tethered to this world by pumps and electrical impulses.
Cormack walked slowly to the side of the bed. His heavy leather shoes squeaked softly against the freshly mopped floor.
He reached out his right hand—the hand that had signed death warrants, laundered millions, and broken the jaws of men who crossed his syndicate—and hovered it over Brin’s cold, limp fingers.
Her skin was translucent. A large purple bruise mottled the inside of her wrist where an IV catheter had blown a vein during the frantic resuscitation attempt.
"You stubborn, foolish woman," Cormack whispered, his voice cracking slightly on the second word. "Why didn't you call?"
He remembered the night he left. It had rained—that miserable, freezing Chicago drizzle that cut right through wool coats. He had sat on the edge of her sagging mattress in the tiny apartment above the club, staring at the peeling floral wallpaper. He had told her that his enemies were closing in, that Aurelio Salcedo was sniffing around his financial records, that anyone associated with him was a target for a drive-by or a federal indictment.
He had believed he was doing her a favor. He had left an envelope with fifty thousand dollars in cash on the bedside table—enough to start over in Denver, in Seattle, anywhere far away from the lakefront shadow economy.
She hadn't touched the envelope. When he came back two hours later to check, the cash was still sitting there, untouched, beside a half-empty mug of cold chamomile tea.
She hadn't wanted his money. She hadn't wanted his protection. She had wanted him. And he had walked out the door because he was coward enough to think his absence was a gift.
"Boss."
Royce’s voice came from the doorway. The big enforcer didn't step inside the sterile box, but his shadow stretched across the floor. "We got a problem downstairs."
Cormack didn't take his eyes off Brin’s chest, which rose and fell only with the mechanical push of the machine. "What kind of problem?"
"Aurelio Salcedo's enforcers just pulled up in three black Escalades," Royce said, his hand twitching near his holster. "Old man Salcedo himself is in the lobby. He's asking why his daughter is sitting in the parking lot in tears, and why his future son-in-law is playing nursemaid to a dying bartender."
Cormack slowly turned his head away from the bed. The grief in his eyes vanished in a fraction of a second, replaced by something much older, much colder, and infinitely more dangerous.
May you like
"Tell Salcedo," Cormack said, his voice dropping into a tone that made Royce instinctively straighten his posture, "that if he sets foot on this floor while my daughter is breathing in the NICU, I will burn his downtown importing empire to ash before the stock market opens tomorrow morning."
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