Chapter 2 - The Red Velvet Booth
The kitchen felt smaller now, suffocatingly so. Oliver had curled up on the corner of our worn sofa, exhausted from his misadventure, fast asleep beneath a fleece blanket. Emma sat rigidly at the kitchen table, her half-finished drawing of a cat abandoned, her eyes darting between Adrian and me.
Adrian didn’t sit. He paced the length of our modest linoleum floor, his heavy leather shoes clicking like a clock ticking down to disaster. His presence filled the room, swallowing the oxygen.
“An ER nurse at Elmhurst,” Adrian said, stopping by the counter where my hospital badge lay next to a stack of medical journals. He picked it up, reading my assumed name—Sophia Miller. Not the name he knew. Not the name his enemies hunted. “You traded a mansion in Manhattan for a two-bedroom apartment in Queens and twelve-hour shifts on the trauma ward.”
“It’s an honest living,” I said, keeping my body positioned between him and Emma.
“Honest?” A dark, humorless laugh escaped his lips. He turned, the overhead light catching the sharp line of his cheekbones. “You think you can hide from me in the outer boroughs, Sophia? Do you have any idea how many people I had looking for you? Men tore apart Chicago, Miami, London—and you were thirty minutes away, wiping stitches in a public hospital.”
“If your men were competent, they would have found me sooner,” I snapped, adrenaline finally overriding my terror.
Adrian stopped dead. He stepped closer, towering over me, the scent of expensive cologne, rain, and winter ozone washing over me. He reached out, his long fingers hovering just an inch from my cheek, trembling slightly before he dropped his hand.
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“Why?” he whispered, the anger stripping away to leave raw, bleeding vulnerability. “Why did you leave that night, Sophia? On our anniversary. The safe room was locked, the guards were at their posts. You packed nothing. You just... vanished.”
“Because your world was killing me, Adrian,” I hissed back, keeping my voice low so Emma wouldn’t catch the sharper edges of our history. “And the moment I realized I was pregnant, I knew it would kill her, too.”
