Chapter 5 - Toxins of the Heart
Nia felt as if the room had suddenly lost all oxygen.
"Don't do that," she whispered, her voice shaking with a dangerous mixture of anger and raw, unhealed pain. "Don't you dare try to rewrite history to make yourself look like a martyr."
"It isn't a rewrite," Daniel said, his knuckles turning white as he gripped her lab coat, pulling her an inch closer to the side of his bed. "Four weeks before our wedding, Marcus Vance brought me into a basement in Cicero. He showed me photos of you, Nia. Photos of you walking to your car at night in the hospital parking garage. Photos of your parents’ home in Houston. He told me that if I didn't break off the engagement and bring the Han family under the Vance umbrella through a political match with Julianna, you would have a fatal accident on your way to the ER."
Nia stared at him, her chest heaving beneath her scrubs. "You think that justifies it? You left me standing at an altar in front of two hundred people! You let me think I was a fool who had given four years of her life to a man who didn't care enough to show up!"
"If I had called you—if I had explained it to you—you would have fought me!" Daniel yelled, his voice cracking with raw emotion, causing his monitor to beep frantically as his heart rate spiked to one hundred and ten. "You were too stubborn, Nia! You would have told me we could fight them together! You would have risked your life because you believed that right always wins over power!"
"And you decided for me?" Nia shouted back, tears of bitter rage finally springing to her eyes. "You decided my life was yours to manage? You humiliated me! You destroyed my faith in people!"
"I saved your life!" Daniel roared, his chest rising violently against his hospital gown. "I let you hate me because hatred kept you alive! If you hated me, you stayed away from me! You didn't come to my clubs, you didn't call my phone, and Vance’s men saw that you were no longer my leverage!"
He let go of her coat, falling back onto his pillows, gasping for air as his monitor screamed a high-pitched alarm for tachycardia.
Nia stood over him, her body shaking, her breath coming in ragged, short hitches. The truth hit her like a physical impact—not bringing relief, but bringing a fresh, agonizing wave of horror at the sheer brutality of the world he had lived in while she had spent four years cursing his name.
"Lie down," she said, her voice cracking as she forced her doctor’s instincts to override the storm inside her chest. She grabbed a syringe of beta-blocker from the tray, wiping the rubber port of his IV line with alcohol before injecting the clear fluid. "Lie down and breathe, Daniel. If your heart goes into SVT right now, the toxicity will cause a fatal stroke."
Daniel didn't push her away. He lay there, staring up at her through blurred eyes as the medication worked its way through his system, slowly pulling his pulse back down from the danger zone.
Beep... beep... beep...
The rhythm settled back to eighty.
Nia wiped her cheeks with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint smudge of clinical dirt on her skin. She walked to the window, staring out into the grey light of dawn beginning to break over the Chicago skyline. Rain was still slanting against the glass, blurring the neon signs of the city below.
"You should have told me," she whispered to the glass. "I deserved the choice, Daniel. I deserved to decide if staying with you was worth the risk."
"You were twenty-nine years old, Nia," Daniel said softly from the bed, his voice drained of all fury, leaving behind only a hollow, terrible exhaustion. "You had a life ahead of you. You were going to be the chief of emergency medicine. You were going to save hundreds of lives. I was already covered in blood. I couldn't let my filth destroy your light."
Nia closed her eyes, letting the cold glass of the window cool her forehead.
"And now?" she asked quietly. "What did your sacrifice buy you, Daniel? You gave up us, you agreed to marry a woman who doesn't love you, and her father still tried to put you six feet under the ground on your wedding night."
Daniel was silent for a long time. When she turned back to look at him, his face was set in lines of hard, unyielding steel.
"Now," Daniel said softly, "the debt is settled. I tried to do it their way. I tried to play the politician to keep my people safe. But Vance tried to take my life on the floor of the Drake Hotel."
He looked up at Nia, his dark eyes filled with a terrifying, absolute promise.
"I’m going to tear his empire to the ground."
The door to the ICU room suddenly clicked open again.
This time, it wasn't Julianna or Dominic. It was Dr. Ethan Ross, his face pale as chalk, his uniform disheveled.
"Nia," Ethan said, his voice trembling. "We have a massive problem."
May you like
Nia stepped away from the window immediately. "What is it?"
"The local police precinct just received an anonymous tip claiming that Dr. Nia Bennett illegally administered an unapproved, experimental drug to a high-profile patient without family consent," Ethan said, reading off his tablet with shaking fingers. "The board of directors is holding an emergency video conference right now. And the hospital chief of staff is on his way up to this floor with two police detectives to suspend your license and take control of Daniel Han’s care."
