Chapter 8 - "Bring Her to Me"
She was slumped sideways in the chair.
When the Lincoln had breached the wall, the shockwave had tipped the wooden legs, and she was hanging at an unnatural angle, held up only by the zip-ties around her bleeding wrists.
Her eyes were wide, dilated with terror, staring at the shattered wall, the dead men, the pool of blood spreading across the concrete from the man who had hit the turbine.
She was hyperventilating—short, shallow, desperate gasps that sounded like a dying bird’s wings.
Daniel Cross stepped through the breach in the brickwork, his rifle lowered to the low ready, his boots crunching on the mortar dust. Behind him, two tactical medics in black rain gear emerged from the darkness of the yard, carrying a hard-shell trauma kit.
"Clear," Daniel called out, his voice sharp and businesslike. "Perimeter secure. Marcus is bringing the transport van around to the slip."
The two medics moved toward the chair, their hands reaching into their medical pouches for trauma shears to cut the zip-ties.
Adrian Vale didn't move.
He stood five feet away, his arms hanging limp at his sides, his chest heaving as if he had run five miles through deep sand. His face was completely devoid of color. The cold, calculating CEO, the ruthless prince of the waterfront, was gone.
What stood in his place was a man who looked as though his heart had been cut out with a dull knife.
The lead medic reached for Nora’s wrist.
Nora flinched—a violent, terrified spasm of her entire body, a scream tearing from her throat that was nothing but raw, animal panic. She didn't know who was touching her. She was blind in one eye, the light was shifting, and the smell of blood was everywhere.
"Get away from her," Adrian whispered.
The medic paused, looking back over his shoulder. "Sir, we need to assess the cervical spine and cut the—"
Adrian’s voice cracked.
It didn't rise into a shout; it broke into a jagged, desperate roar that made Daniel Cross freeze in his tracks.
"Bring her to me!"
The room stopped.
Daniel caught the medic’s shoulder and pulled him back two paces.
Adrian fell to his knees.
He didn't care about the oily water soaking through his trousers. He didn't care about the glass that bit into his shins. He crawled the last three feet across the cold concrete, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold himself upright.
"Nora," he choked out.
His voice was unrecognizable. It wasn't the voice of Adrian Vale. It was the sound of a boy weeping over a grave.
"Nora... Nora, look at me. Look at my face."
He reached out, his large, rough hands hovering inches from her skin, terrified that touching her would cause her more pain.
She stopped struggling.
Through the swollen slit of her right eyelid, through the tears and the blood drying on her cheek, she saw him.
Not the polished man in the three-piece suit.
She saw Adrian. His hair was soaked, plastered to his forehead by the rain. His face was smeared with black grease and red mortar dust. And down his pale cheeks, two clear tracks were being cut through the grime by silent, unstoppable tears.
"Adrian?" she breathed.
"I’m here," he wept, his forehead dropping against her knee, his shoulders shaking with great, heaving sobs that ripped through his chest like shrapnel. "I’m here. I’m sorry. God, Nora, I’m so sorry. I should have been there. I should have burned them all before they touched you."
He reached behind the chair with a small pocket knife, his fingers clumsy, trembling as he sliced through the plastic bindings around her wrists.
The moment the zip-ties gave way, Nora’s dead, bloodless arms fell forward.
She didn't pull away from the blood on his hands. She didn't shrink from the violence that filled the room.
She leaned forward, her face burying itself into the curve of his neck, her small, trembling fingers tangling into the wet cashmere of his collar.
"You came," she sobbed into his skin, her voice muffled by his hair. "You came for me."
Adrian lifted her.
He did not let the medics touch her. He gathered her into his arms, lifting her against his chest as if she weighed no more than an armful of dry canvases. He held her so tightly that her bruised ribs must have ached, but she only clung tighter, her forehead pressed against his pulse point.
He stood up in the ruins of the turbine hall.
Behind him, Mickey Flaherty was still groaning on the floor, his broken shoulder pinned against the wet concrete.
"Adrian," Daniel said quietly, stepping forward. He pointed the barrel of his rifle toward Flaherty. "What do we do with the old man?"
Adrian did not turn around.
He looked down at Nora’s face, at the terrible, ugly bruise that darkened her jawline, at the blood on her lips that had come from his past, from his name, from the sins of a family he had tried so hard to outrun.
"Leave him for the state," Adrian said, his voice flat and dead. "Give the feds the recordings. Give them the accounts. Give them everything they need to bury the Santoros until the name doesn't exist."
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He walked toward the breach in the brick wall, carrying her out of the dark, out of the smell of sulfur and iron, into the clean, cold wash of the November rain.
***
