Chapter 1 - The Light Behind the Velvet
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. 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, shower-coating my scrubs in wet shards.
Liam Mercer lay in the enormous bed, bruised and pale, his right leg trapped inside an external fixator, metal pins drilled directly into bone. Heavy abdominal bandages were already bleeding through in dark, rusted patches.
“Turn that light off.”
“No.”
His icy blue eyes narrowed.
“I need to inspect your wound.”
“Get out.”
I washed my hands in the adjoining bathroom 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 around the suture line.
Liam grabbed my wrist, his fingers clamping down like iron shackles. “Don’t touch me.”
“You’re cutting off circulation to my fingers.”
His grip tightened, muscles straining against his collarbone. “I said don’t.”
I met his stare, refusing to flinch. “If I leave that tissue untreated, bacteria enter your bloodstream, sepsis sets in, and you die in twenty-four hours.” I leaned closer until I could feel the feverish heat radiating off his face. “And I need you alive until Friday.”
Something shifted in his expression—a spark of cold, incredulous calculation overriding his rage. Slowly, he released me.
I cleaned the wound with peroxide, administered intravenous antibiotics, checked every pin site in his leg, and sat in the corner armchair with a paperback.
“Turn the light off,” he growled.
“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 glassware. Instead, he punished me with silence.
“Pain from one to ten?” I asked, holding his morphine dose.
Nothing. He stared at the ceiling, his jaw clamped shut like a vault door.
“Fine. You can be stubborn in pain.” I placed the syringe back on the tray.
That afternoon, I noticed something I had missed before. Every time a stray sliver of afternoon sunlight slipped through the tiny gap between the heavy velvet 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. It was the first word he had spoken to me in eight hours.
My hand closed around the cord anyway. I pulled.
May you like
The heavy drapes parted, and golden sunlight flooded the room, illuminating the dust motes, the heavy mahogany furniture, and the pale, scarred reality of the man in the bed.
Liam gasped, flinching as if struck, but he did not shut his eyes. He bathed in it.
