Chapter 2 - The Shadows of North Avenue
By six in the morning, the master suite looked less like a bedroom and more like a field hospital.
Dr. Harrison Vance—a man who had been on my private payroll for a decade and had dug three sub-machine gun slugs out of my shoulder six years ago—was bent over Emma with a portable monitor and a blood-gas analyzer. Luke stood by the foot of the bed, his arms crossed over his leather jacket, his eyes darting between the unconscious maid and me.
I sat in my wheelchair near the fireplace, holding the crushed glass ampoule between my thumb and forefinger.
"Well?" I asked, breaking the quiet hum of the heart monitor.
Vance pulled his stethoscope from his ears and let it drape around his neck. He looked visibly rattled, a reaction I rarely saw from a surgeon who had spent twenty years patching up syndicate enforcers in back-alley clinics.
"It’s not poison in the conventional sense, Danny," Vance said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. "It’s a high-grade synthetic peptide compound. Extremely rare, highly illegal, and ridiculously dangerous. It’s designed to temporarily force damaged peripheral nerves to fire across damaged synapses."
"She said it keeps her heart from failing," I said.
"She’s partly right," Vance replied, pointing to the digital readout on his screen. "Her autonomic nervous system is in a state of advanced hereditary degeneration. It’s a rare motor-neuron atrophy. Without high doses of aggressive neuro-stimulants, her muscles lock up, her heart rhythm destabilizes, and she suffers extreme, excruciating spasms. This stuff... it’s a temporary patch. It forces the nerves to work for twelve hours at a time, but the rebound effect when it wears off is brutal."
Luke let out a low whistle. "She’s been scrubbing your baseboards and carrying thirty-pound laundry baskets while her nervous system is literally short-circuiting itself?"
I didn't answer Luke. I kept my eyes on Vance. "Where does someone making twelve dollars an hour at a diner get an experimental military-grade neuro-peptide?"
Vance took the glass ampoule from my hand, holding it up to the desk lamp to examine the tiny batch number etched into the base.
"They don't," Vance said quietly. "Not legally. Not illegally, either. This isn't street stuff, Danny. This comes from a high-containment research facility. A single dose of this on the black market would run at least three thousand dollars."
I leaned back in my chair, my mind cold and calculating. "She works two jobs to pay her mother's memory-care bills. She doesn't have three thousand dollars for a sandwich, let alone a daily injection."
"Then someone is giving it to her," Luke said, his voice dropping into that dark, dangerous register he used when a threat was near. "Or someone is using her as a human trial."
The room fell quiet again, save for the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor.
On the bed, Emma shifted. Her eyelids fluttered, and a faint groan escaped her lips. She tried to sit up, her hand instantly reaching toward her waist as if searching for the missing syringe.
"Don't move," Vance said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Your blood pressure is ninety over sixty, Miss Carter. If you stand up right now, you'll hit the floor."
Emma’s eyes snapped open. She looked at Vance, then at Luke, and finally her gaze landed on me sitting in the wheelchair by the hearth. Her face drained of what little color it had regained.
"Danny..." she whispered, her hands pulling the silk duvet up to her collarbone as if trying to hide behind it. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll pack my things. I'll go."
"You're not going anywhere," I said flatly. "Not until you tell me who gave you that ampoule."
Emma bit her lower lip, her chest rising and falling rapidly. "I bought it."
"Lie to me again," I said, leaning forward in my chair, resting my forearms on my knees, "and I'll have Luke search your mother's care facility from the roof to the boiler room."
Her eyes went wide with pure panic. "No! Leave her out of this! Please!"
"Then talk," I commanded.
Emma looked away, staring at the dark wood of the floorboards. A heavy, painful silence hung over the room for nearly a minute before she finally spoke, her voice barely audible over the hum of the medical equipment.
"Eight months ago, my hands started locking up," she murmured. "I dropped a tray at the diner. I couldn't feel my feet when I walked up the stairs to my apartment. I went to three clinics. They all said the same thing: hereditary motor neuropathy. They said there was no cure, only supportive care. They gave me six months before I’d be in a wheelchair."
She looked at me then—a raw, pointed look that carried no pity, only the cold shared reality of two people whose bodies had betrayed them.
"I couldn't be in a wheelchair, Danny," she said softly. "My mother’s facility costs four thousand a month. If I stop working, she gets moved to a state ward where they leave the patients in bed all day. I couldn't let that happen."
"Go on," I said.
"A doctor at the third clinic... he saw me crying in the parking lot," Emma continued. "He gave me an address on North Avenue. A place called the Vane Neurological Institute. He said they were running private, off-the-books trials for people with no other options. He said if I agreed to take the injections and let them monitor my blood work twice a week, they’d provide the compound for free."
Luke looked at me, his brows furrowed. "Vane Neurological? That’s a subsidiary of Vanguard Bio-Tech."
My blood ran cold.
Vanguard Bio-Tech wasn't just a medical company. Vanguard was owned by Victor Vane—the man who had bought up three of my downtown properties after I was shot, the man whose name had been linked to every high-level land grab in the West Loop for five years, and the man my intelligence network suspected had hired the sniper who put a bullet through my spine.
I stared at Emma, the pieces falling into place with a terrifying, mathematical precision.
"They aren't trying to cure you, Emma," I said, my voice dropping into a register that made Luke instinctively take a step back. "They're using you to test a drug that forces nerve regeneration."
Emma frowned, confused. "What does that matter? It works! It lets me walk! It lets me earn money!"
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"It matters," I said, rising up slightly in my chair before settling back down, my fists clenched on the armrests, "because Victor Vane doesn't care about dying maids. He’s developing that drug for high-value targets. He’s developing it for people who can pay ten million dollars for a cure."
People like me.
