Chapter 1 - THE BLOOD ON THE PRESCRIPTION BOTTLEThe rain over Seattle didn’t fall so much as it drowned the city, sweeping off Puget Sound in icy sheets that rattled the glass windows of the emergency transport van.
Inside, the sterile smell of rubbing alcohol and fresh blood was overwhelming. Siren lights strobed red and blue across the padded interior, illuminating Damian Cross’s face in jagged, terrifying pulses. The man who commanded shipping lanes, logistics empires, and a dark network of silence throughout the Pacific Northwest was on his knees.
He didn’t care about the mud soaking his Italian wool trousers or the shattered glass from the clinic light fixture still embedded in the leather of his designer shoes. His massive, calloused hands—hands that had signed off on multi-million-dollar deals and, if rumors were true, ordered the quiet disappearance of men who crossed him—were trembling violently around mine.
"Hold on, Elena," Damian growled, his voice a raw, scraping whisper that sounded entirely broken. "You hold on to me. Do you hear me? Look at my eyes."
I couldn't. Another contraction tore through my lower abdomen, sharp as a serrated knife dragging across raw nerve endings. I squeezed my eyes shut, gasping for air that felt like liquid fire in my lungs. Beneath the thin linen of my yellow maternity dress, my baby—our baby girl—stirred weakly. Her kicks were no longer the fierce, energetic protests of a healthy infant; they were sluggish, faltering movements.
The sedative. Noah Reed had been poisoning us.
Dr. Avery Lang sat wedged in the corner of the moving van, her hands frantically wrapping a pressure cuff around my arm while monitor cables snaked across my legs. Her face was deathly white, smeared with a streak of soot from Noah’s gunshots.
"Her blood pressure is plummeting, Mr. Cross!" Dr. Lang shouted over the wail of the siren. "Eighty over forty-five! The placental abruption is progressing. The drug Noah used—it’s a concentrated derivative of a heavy neurological sedative. It lowers maternal vascular resistance while restricting oxygen flow through the umbilical cord!"
Damian’s dark eyes snapped toward the doctor, filled with a lethal, terrifying heat. "Fix it. I don't care what medication you give her, I don't care what equipment you need—you keep my wife and my daughter alive, or I will tear down every medical board in this country and bury you beneath them."
"Damian..." I managed to choke out, my hand tightening weakly around his wrist. The cold metal of his wedding band—a band he had never taken off, even six months after our divorce was finalized—pressed into my palm. "Don't... don't threaten her. She saved us..."
Damian looked back down at me, the terrifying monster instantly vanishing, replaced by a man gripped by absolute, unadulterated agony. He bowed his head until his forehead rested against my knuckles, his hot breath washing over my freezing skin.
"I’m sorry," he rasped, a single tear escaping his lashes and disappearing into my knuckles. "I’m so sorry, Elena. I thought I was keeping you in a gilded cage to protect you from the world. I didn't see that the wolf was standing right behind my shoulder."
"Noah..." I swallowed hard, tasting copper. "Why? He worked for you for twelve years..."
"Because Noah didn't work for me," Damian said, his jaw flexing with such force I heard his teeth grind together. "He worked for my father’s legacy. Noah believed I became soft the moment I married you. He thought a wife made me vulnerable. And when he realized I would give up everything to keep you safe, he decided to eliminate the 'distraction' slowly enough that I would think you died of natural complications."
Dr. Lang’s monitor gave a sharp, high-pitched BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
"She’s in fetal distress!" Dr. Lang cried, grabbing a syringe from the emergency kit. "We aren't going to make it to Swedish Hospital in time for a standard delivery! We need to prepare for an emergency crash C-section the second the doors open at the trauma bay!"
Damian stood up in the swaying van, his hand reaching into his coat pocket. He pulled out a small, amber plastic prescription bottle—the very bottle Dr. Lang had snatched from my apartment counter during the chaos of the clinic shooting.
He stared at the label. Printed in neat, computerized text was my name: Elena Cross. But beneath the pharmacy name, in tiny, almost invisible ink, was a batch number registered to a private pharmaceutical laboratory in Vancouver—a lab owned by a holding company Noah Reed had created three years ago.
"He didn't just want you dead, Elena," Damian said, his voice dropping into a deadly, horrifying register as the van lurched to a halt outside the hospital bay. "He wanted me to watch you wither away so I would become the cold, heartless bastard he thought the Cross Empire needed. He wanted to break me."
The rear doors of the van flew open. Rain roared into the vehicle alongside a team of six trauma surgeons and nurses in blue scrubs.
"Patient is twenty-six-year-old female, thirty-five weeks gestation, acute placental separation, toxicological exposure!" Dr. Lang screamed over the noise, hopping out of the van as the gurney was pulled into the storm.
Damian walked beside the gurney, his hand never leaving mine. His black coat was soaked, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, looking like a demonic force cutting through the sterile white lights of the trauma corridor.
"Mr. Cross, you cannot enter the operating theater!" a male nurse shouted, stepping in front of the double doors.
Damian didn't even slow down. He placed one hand on the nurse's collar and shoved him aside with effortless, terrifying strength. "If anyone tries to separate me from my wife, they won't leave this hallway on two legs."
"Damian!" I cried out as the bright lights of the surgical room blinded me. My body was shaking uncontrollably from shock. "The baby... please, don't let them take her away if..."
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He leaned down over the operating table, ignoring the surgeons frantically scrubbing around him. He pressed his lips firmly against my forehead, holding my face in his huge, warm hands.
"She will live, Elena," he swore, staring straight into my soul with an intensity that burned through the dark fog clouding my mind. "And the man who laid a hand on you will realize that dying was the easiest gift I could have ever given him."
