Chapter 3 - THE WOMAN HE NEVER KNEW
By the time police arrived at the construction site, Samantha had already made one decision.
She was not going home.
Alexander didn’t argue.
That surprised her.
Most wealthy men she had treated considered disagreement a temporary technical problem. Alexander listened, looked at the executive security badge in his hand, and told the responding detectives that Samantha would be leaving with him.
Not to his penthouse.
Not to his estate.
Not to anywhere listed under his name.
Forty-five minutes later, they entered a narrow townhouse in Brooklyn Heights that looked as though nobody important had lived there in fifty years.
Alexander locked the door.
Samantha looked around.
“No cameras?”
“None connected to Cole Meridian.”
“Security system?”
“Independent.”
“Who knows you own it?”
“My attorney.”
She looked at him.
“That’s not the comforting answer you think it is.”
Alexander removed his wet jacket.
“You’re suspicious of everyone.”
“Tonight somebody shot your driver.”
“Elias will live.”
“Because the bullet missed his subclavian artery by less than an inch.”
He studied her.
“You knew exactly where to look.”
“I’m a trauma nurse.”
“You also identified a tail before my professionally trained driver did. You redirected an ambush, created a decoy, disappeared behind a concrete column, and came back without making enough sound for me to hear you.”
Samantha walked toward the kitchen.
“I’m tired.”
“That doesn’t explain it.”
“No. It explains why I don’t feel like discussing it.”
Alexander followed.
“You asked me to trust you completely.”
“And you did.”
“Now I’m asking you to trust me.”
Samantha stopped.
He wasn’t angry.
That would have been easier.
He was standing three feet away, soaked from the rain, shirt stained with Elias’s blood, looking at her like he was trying to understand a person who had suddenly become far more complicated than the memory he had carried for nine months.
She exhaled.
“I was in the Army.”
Alexander said nothing.
“Six years,” she continued. “Army Nurse Corps. Trauma and emergency medicine. I spent part of that time attached to aeromedical evacuation teams.”
“That explains the scars?”
“Some of them.”
“And the rest?”
“Life.”
He waited.
She hated that he was good at silence.
“Before I became a nurse,” Samantha said, “my father was a paramedic. He taught me to notice things. Exits. People watching too closely. Cars that appear twice. Hands that disappear into pockets when they shouldn’t.”
“And the Army taught you the rest.”
“It taught me that panic uses oxygen you might need later.”
Alexander leaned against the counter.
“Why did you leave?”
Samantha’s eyes hardened slightly.
“That isn’t part of tonight.”
He nodded once.
No pushing.
No dramatic sympathy.
She appreciated that more than she wanted to.
Alexander crossed to an old desk in the adjoining room and opened a hidden compartment beneath it.
Inside was a laptop.
“Offline backup system,” he said.
“You have secret townhouses and hidden computers?”
“I’m a billionaire.”
“Is there a handbook?”
“We get it after the first hostile board vote.”
Despite herself, Samantha smiled.
It disappeared when the laptop screen illuminated.
Alexander opened a folder.
“Nine months ago, the night I ended up in your trauma bay, I had just left Pier Seventeen.”
“What’s there?”
“One of our freight terminals.”
He pulled up financial documents.
“Cole Meridian was negotiating a four-hundred-eighty-million-dollar modernization contract with the city and several private investors. Clean shipping infrastructure, electrified freight systems, new warehousing.”
Samantha scanned the figures.
“Sounds glamorous.”
“It was supposed to be.”
“Supposed to?”
“Three weeks before my accident, an internal auditor named Michael Rourke found irregularities.”
“How irregular?”
“Seventy-two million dollars moved through subcontractors that barely existed.”
Samantha looked up.
“And nobody noticed?”
“I did.”
“When?”
“The night of the crash.”
Alexander clicked another file.
“I met Rourke at Pier Seventeen. He told me the missing money was only the beginning. Someone was inflating contracts, buying contaminated industrial property through shell companies, and planning to force Cole Meridian to absorb the liabilities after the deal closed.”
Samantha’s expression sharpened.
“Who?”
“He wouldn’t say over the phone.”
“What did he tell you at the meeting?”
Alexander went silent.
“He never arrived.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead.”
Samantha stared at him.
Alexander’s jaw tightened.
“His car went into the Hudson two days later.”
“And police called it an accident.”
“Yes.”
Samantha slowly lowered herself into a chair.
“Your brakes failed after you went to meet a whistleblower. The whistleblower died forty-eight hours later. Tonight someone connected to your security department tried to kill you.”
“When you say it like that, I admit it sounds unfavorable.”
She glared at him.
Alexander almost smiled.
Then his face turned serious.
“There’s more.”
He opened a photograph from the night of his crash.
A wrecked black sedan sat against a concrete divider.
Samantha recognized it instantly.
Something cold moved through her.
“What?”
Alexander turned toward her.
She enlarged the image.
Then enlarged it again.
“The rear passenger door.”
“What about it?”
“Was anyone else in the car?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I drove myself.”
Samantha pointed.
“That blood isn’t yours.”
Alexander stared.
There was a smear near the rear door.
Dark.
Easy to miss.
“How can you know that?”
“Because your injury was on your right side. That smear is on the outer rear left door. If you were bleeding enough to leave that, there would have been a trail between the driver’s seat and the rear panel.”
Alexander’s face went still.
“There isn’t.”
“No.”
He stared at the photograph.
“Someone else was there.”
“Or someone reached into the car after the crash.”
A memory surfaced.
Samantha froze.
Alexander saw it.
“What?”
She stood.
“Nine months ago. Trauma Bay Four.”
“What about it?”
“There was a man.”
Alexander stepped closer.
“What man?”
“I thought he was with EMS.”
“What did he do?”
“He came into the trauma bay while we were stabilizing you.”
Her mind was suddenly back beneath those fluorescent lights.
Alexander pale.
Blood everywhere.
Monitors screaming.
People moving.
And one man standing too still.
“He had gloves on,” Samantha whispered.
“That’s normal.”
“Not those gloves.”
Alexander waited.
“They were clean.”
“So?”
“Everyone who touched you was covered in blood. He walked in after you had already been transferred from the ambulance stretcher. I remember thinking he didn’t belong.”
“What happened?”
“He reached toward your IV port.”
Alexander’s eyes locked onto hers.
“You stopped him?”
“I told him to get out.”
“And?”
“He left.”
“Just like that?”
“No. He looked at me first.”
Samantha’s voice dropped.
“Like he was memorizing my face.”
Silence swallowed the room.
Alexander closed the laptop halfway.
“Could you recognize him?”
“Maybe.”
He opened a personnel database stored on the machine.
Headshots appeared.
Security executives.
Drivers.
Operations staff.
Samantha scanned them.
No.
No.
No.
Then her finger stopped.
A photograph showed a clean-cut man with silver at his temples and calm blue eyes.
Samantha felt the room shrink.
“Him.”
Alexander didn’t move.
“You’re sure?”
“Ninety percent.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why?”
Alexander looked at the name beneath the photograph.
NATHANIEL MERCER
Chief Financial Officer
Cole Meridian Holdings
Samantha studied his face.
“You know him.”
Alexander let out a strange breath.
“Nate was my roommate at Columbia.”
That was not what she expected.
“He helped me build this company.”
“Alexander—”
“He was in the hospital after my crash.”
“When?”
“The next morning.”
Samantha looked at the photograph again.
“He was there the night before.”
Alexander shook his head.
“You were exhausted. There was chaos.”
“I remember faces.”
“He has no medical training.”
“Then why was he reaching for your IV?”
The question hung between them.
Alexander took out his phone.
Samantha grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t call him.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Who were you calling?”
“My sister.”
Something in his expression frightened Samantha more than the gunshots.
“Why?”
Alexander looked at the time.
“My sister Claire and her son Theo are staying at my house outside the city.”
“Does Nate know that?”
“Yes.”
Samantha closed her eyes.
“Call her.”
Alexander dialed.
No answer.
Again.
No answer.
He called the house line.
Nothing.
His breathing changed.
“Claire always answers.”
Samantha was already reaching for her jacket.
Alexander’s phone vibrated.
Unknown number.
A photograph appeared.
Claire Cole was asleep on a sofa.
Eleven-year-old Theo lay curled beside her beneath a blanket.
The image had been taken from inside the room.
Underneath it was one sentence.
YOU SURVIVED BECAUSE OF HER ONCE.
May you like
A second message appeared.
LET’S SEE IF SHE CAN SAVE THREE PEOPLE TONIGHT.
