Chapter 6 - THE GHOST OF ROOM 317
The tactical operative didn't even have time to gasp.
With a sickening crunch of cartilage, the man was yanked backward out of the bathroom, hurled through the air like a ragdoll, and slammed into the drywall of the suite with enough force to shatter the plaster. He slid down in a boneless heap, completely unconscious.
Through the swirling white haze of the knockout gas, a towering figure stepped into the bathroom doorway.
It was Roman Hale.
He was still wearing his open-backed hospital gown, his bare feet stained with dust, and a thick white bandage wrapped securely around his abdomen where the bullets had torn through him three weeks ago. Dark crimson was already beginning to seep through the linen over his wound, but his face was an absolute mask of cold, unmitigated fury.
He looked less like a recovering patient and more like a mythological beast that had clawed its way straight out of hell.
“Roman...” Claire breathed, her voice trembling, half-choked by the lingering gas.
Roman’s eyes swept over her and Lily. When he saw that the little girl was safe, the terrifying, predatory tension in his shoulders dropped just a fraction. He stepped past the unconscious henchman, knelt down on the cold bathroom tile, and extended a large, steady hand.
“Give her to me,” Roman commanded, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that vibrated through the floorboards.
Claire didn't hesitate. She handed sleeping Lily over to him. Roman scooped the child up with one arm, cradling her effortlessly against his broad chest, using his massive frame to completely shield her from the toxic air.
With his free hand, Roman grabbed Claire by the wrist, pulling her to her feet with surprising strength.
“Can you walk?” he asked, his slate-grey eyes locked onto hers.
“Y-yes,” Claire stammered, swaying slightly as the residual gas made her head spin.
“Stay behind me. Do not look back. Do not make a sound,” Roman ordered, turning sharply toward the ruined doorway of the suite.
As they stepped out into the hallway, Claire gasped.
Two more of Marcus Vance’s tactical guards were sprawled out unconscious on the plush carpet of the fourth-floor corridor. There were no bullet holes, no knife wounds. Just brutal, precise, hand-to-hand trauma delivered by a man who had supposedly spent three weeks paralyzed in a coma.
“How... how are you doing this?” Claire whispered, her mind struggling to comprehend the sheer physical impossibility of what she was witnessing. “The doctors said your nervous system was fried. They said you shouldn't even be able to stand.”
Roman didn't look back as he marched down the dimly lit hallway toward the service elevators.
“Doctors read charts, Claire,” Roman replied coldly. “They don't know what it takes to survive in Chicago.”
They reached the service elevator bank. Roman punched the manual override code into the maintenance keypad with his elbow. A hidden panel slid open, revealing a private, freight-sized elevator shaft that bypassed the hospital’s main electrical grid entirely.
As the heavy metal doors slid open, Roman paused, looking back down the corridor with a dark, calculated smirk.
“Marcus thinks he cut the head off the snake,” Roman muttered softly, stepping into the elevator with Lily still resting safely in his arms. “He’s about to find out the snake was just shedding its skin.”
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The doors closed, plunging them into darkness as the elevator plummeted downward into the subterranean depths beneath Saint Mark Medical Center.
Little did they know, waiting for them at the bottom of that elevator shaft wasn't a way out—it was an ambush orchestrated by the one person Roman trusted most.
