Chapter 3 - THE SAFE HOUSE CONFINEMENT
The sound of Damian's voice was the only thing that kept my legs from folding underneath me.
Before the remaining two gunmen could pivot toward him, Damian moved with the lethal, fluid grace of a man who had survived a dozen turf wars before his thirtieth birthday. He fired twice in rapid succession. The heavy rounds tore through ballistic vests like wet paper, dropping both men to the asphalt before they could clear their muzzles.
Rain poured down in relentless sheets, washing the dark pool of blood toward the storm drains. Damian dropped the rifle, his boots crunching heavily over shattered glass as he closed the distance between us in three long strides.
His large hands seized my shoulders, pulling me roughly to my feet. He didn't ask if I was guilty. He didn't ask about the stolen toxin. His fingers dug into my arms with an intensity that bordered on painful, his dark eyes raking over my torn gown, the blood streaming down my temple, the violent trembling of my frame.
“Did they hit you?” his voice was raw, stripped entirely of the cold billionaire persona he wore in boardrooms.
“No,” I choked out, my teeth chattering from shock and freezing rain. “No, they—Marcus is bleeding out, Damian! His chest, right anterior quadrant—he’s developing a tension pneumothorax, I heard the air hissing!”
Even with my hands shaking and my life on the line, the emergency room nurse in me took over. I pulled away from Damian, dropping to my knees beside Marcus’s crumpled form. The security chief was gasping, frothy pink bubbles forming at his lips. His trachea was deviating to the left—classic signs of a collapsed lung filling his chest cavity with trapped air. In less than two minutes, his heart would stop from the pressure.
“Give me a knife,” I commanded, looking up at Damian. “Now!”
Damian knelt beside me instantly, pulling a slim, razor-sharp tactical blade from his boot. “What are you doing?”
“Relieving the pleural pressure before his heart arrests.” I ripped a strip of silk from the hem of my dress, sanitized the blade with the high-proof bourbon Damian handed me from his glove compartment, and found the second intercostal space along Marcus's collarbone.
Without hesitating, I drove the tip of the blade down between his ribs until I felt the pop of the pleura. A sharp hiss of pressurized air escaped with a mist of blood. Marcus gasped, his back arching, air finally rushing back into his working lung. I rolled the plastic casing of a tire-pressure gauge from the car's emergency kit into the puncture to act as a temporary flutter valve, taping it down with electrical tape from the trunk.
Marcus’s eyes fluttered open, staring at me in disbelief. The woman he had accused of treason five minutes ago had just plunged a knife into his chest to keep him breathing.
“Call the extraction team,” Damian ordered into his comm-link, his gaze fixed on my bloody hands, his expression an unreadable mix of fury and dark reverence. “Two ambulances, unmarked. Clear the private clinic in Revere. Move.”
Within four minutes, two black vans arrived, sweeping Marcus onto a gurney. But Damian didn’t let them touch me. Instead, he scooped me into his arms, ignoring the blood and rain soaking his expensive shirt, and carried me directly to the passenger seat of his private coupe.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked weakly as he slammed the door and gunned the engine, tearing away from the carnage. “Back to a holding cell?”
“To my home,” Damian answered flatly, his hands white-knuckled on the leather steering wheel. “The estate in the Berkshires. Not the penthouse. Nobody knows about the mountain house except three people on this earth. Clearly, one of them is trying to burn my world to the ground.”
“You still think I stole that poison,” I said, turning my head to look at his sharp, shadowed profile. The car heater was blasting, but I couldn't stop shivering.
“If you wanted me dead, Elena, you wouldn’t have pushed me out of the way of that vial. You wouldn’t have saved the man who just accused you of treason.” He glanced at me, his jaw tightening so hard a muscle twitched. “You’re brilliant, you notice everything, and you have the hands of a healer. But someone inside my inner circle used you as the perfect patsy. They knew I was looking at you. They knew I brought you to that gala. And they knew if the poison traced back to your badge, I would execute you before asking questions.”
“Who would do that?”
“Julian Vance,” he said quietly.
The name struck me like a physical blow. My breath caught in my throat. “My... my brother? Julian died three years ago in a car crash!”
Damian didn’t answer immediately. He turned the car onto a dark, winding mountain road shrouded in dense pine trees. The rain turned to sleet, rattling against the windshield.
“Julian didn’t die in a car crash, Elena. He stole eight million dollars from the Moretti family’s pharmaceutical laundering operation, faked his death with a dental record swap at Boston General, and vanished into their debt-slave network.” Damian pulled up before a massive, isolated fortress of stone and blackened timber overlooking a jagged ravine.
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He cut the engine and turned to me, his dark eyes burning in the dim dashboard light.
“Your brother is alive. He’s the head chemist who formulated that poison. And twenty minutes ago, while we were being ambushed on the highway, his signature was used to transfer thirty million dollars out of my clinic’s offshore holding account.”
