Chapter 3 - The Black Maybach
The private elevator down to the basement executive garage moved in complete silence.
Beatrice stood in the center of the brass-lined car, wrapped in Dante’s heavy coat. The warmth of the cashmere was overwhelming, carrying his rich, woody scent. Beside her, Dante stood with his hands behind his back, staring straight ahead at the digital floor indicator.
She kept looking down at her shoes. The worn rubber soles were slick with soapy residue, leaving tiny damp spots on the immaculate carpet of the elevator.
"Mr. Vance," she began, her voice still hoarse.
"Dante," he corrected softly, without looking at her.
"I... I don't understand," she said, clutching the edges of the coat tightly around her chest. "Why did you do that? You don't know me."
Dante turned his head slowly, his storm-gray eyes softening as he looked down at her.
"I know you better than you think, Beatrice," he said. "Three years ago, on a rainy Tuesday in November, a man named Thomas Vance was brought into the Emergency Department at Lakeview Memorial."
Beatrice’s eyes widened. She searched her memory, digging back through the haze of trauma, the long twelve-hour shifts, the hundreds of faces that had passed through her hands.
"Thomas..." she whispered. "The thoracic trauma. The car crash on the Kennedy Expressway."
"He was my younger brother," Dante said quietly. "His aorta was torn. The surgical resident on call panic-froze. The attending physician was forty minutes away in Evanston. You were the charge nurse in Bay Four."
A sudden memory flashed in Beatrice’s mind: a young man, barely twenty-five, blood pouring over the gurney, his blood pressure dropping to zero. She remembered grabbing a tray of vascular clamps, shoving the resident out of the way, and holding the torn vessel closed with her bare fingers for twenty-two minutes until the chief surgeon arrived.
"He lived," Beatrice murmured.
"He lived because of you," Dante said. "He is currently running our operations in London. He has a wife and a six-month-old daughter. Every time I look at his child's picture, I see your face."
The elevator chimed, indicating their arrival at the sub-basement level. The brass doors slid open to reveal an empty, brightly lit private garage. A sleek, midnight-black Maybach sat idling in the center lane, its tinted windows reflecting the overhead lights.
"When you were destroyed by Harrison Weber," Dante continued, his tone dropping into a icy register, "I was in the middle of a war with the syndicate in Philadelphia. By the time I returned to Chicago and found out what had happened to your license, you had vanished. Weber bought off the board, locked the court records, and wiped your name from every hospital system in the city."
Beatrice felt a lump form in her throat. For three years, she had believed that nobody cared, that her sacrifice had been completely invisible, that the world had accepted the lie without a second thought.
"I have been looking for you for two years, Beatrice," Dante said gently, extending his arm once more. "I did not expect to find you scrubbing floors for idiots like Bradley Pierce."
Beatrice looked down at her damp uniform pants sticking out from beneath the multi-thousand-dollar coat.
"I’m not the same person, Mr... Dante," she whispered, her voice cracking with shame. "Look at me. I'm... I'm a mess. I gained a hundred pounds. I can barely walk down a hallway without my back hurting. I'm broken."
Dante stepped closer. He didn't look at her body with disgust. He didn't look at her with awkward charity. He looked at her as if she were a priceless masterpiece that had simply been left in the rain.
"A sword does not lose its edge simply because it is covered in rust, Beatrice," Dante said firmly. "You saved my family. Now it is my turn to save yours."
He opened the rear door of the Maybach himself, stepping aside to let her enter the heated leather interior.
May you like
"Where are we going?" she asked, hesitating on the threshold.
"First, to your apartment in Cicero to collect your mother," Dante replied, closing his own coat as Arthur stepped into the driver’s seat. "And then, home."
