Chapter 4 - Shadows in the Parking Garage
By 5:30 AM, the gray light of dawn was beginning to bleed through the fog hanging over the Chicago skyline, casting long, bruised shadows across the asphalt of St. Catherine’s underground parking garage.
I had slipped out of Room 204 while Milo was sleeping fitfully, needing a breath of air that didn't smell like bleach and panic. I stood near the exit stairwell, hugging my arms around myself against the damp morning chill, watching the rhythmic drip of water from a leaking overhead pipe.
Footsteps echoed off the concrete—heavy, measured, unmistakable.
I didn't need to turn around to know it was Nico. He materialized beside me like a ghost, holding two paper cups of terrible hospital coffee. He extended one toward me without a word.
I didn't take it. "I don't want your coffee, Nico."
"You haven't slept in thirty hours," he said, his voice flat. "Drink it. It has three sugars. You like it sweet."
I looked at him, genuinely stunned. "You remember how I take my coffee?"
"I remember everything about you, Claire," he said simply, his dark eyes fixed on the distant exit ramp. "That was never the problem."
"Then what was?" I snapped, the exhaustion finally overriding my caution. "What was the problem when you threw me out into the snow with a fifty-thousand-dollar check and a mandate to vanish? Was it because I wasn't high-society enough for your council meetings? Because my father was a dockworker instead of a senator?"
Nico’s expression didn't change, but his jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth might crack.
"You were carrying my child," he said, his voice dropping into a dangerous whisper. "And my rivals were circling my house like wolves. The Italian syndicate had put a bounty on my bloodline. The moment they found out I had a woman—a civilian with no protection, no family in the life—they would have torn you apart to get to me."
"So your solution was to tear me apart yourself?" I shouted, the memory of that brutal night flooding back with blinding clarity. "You didn't protect me, Nico! You discarded me! You stood in that glass office and told me that my presence was a liability, that I was a liability!"
"I lied," he said.
The words hung in the damp air of the parking garage, dead and heavy.
I stared at him, my breath catching in my throat. "What?"
Nico turned his head to look at me, and for the first time in two years, I saw the jagged, bleeding edges of the man beneath the armor.
"I told you you were a liability because I couldn't bear the thought of watching you die on my floor," he said, his voice cracking slightly on the edges. "I thought if I cut you loose—if I made you hate me enough to run as far away from Chicago as humanly possible—you and the child you were carrying might actually stand a chance. I built an empire on blood, Claire. I knew what my enemies would do to a baby bearing my name. So I made myself the villain so you could survive."
The coffee cup slipped from my fingers, hitting the concrete with a dull thud, brown liquid splashing across the hem of my jeans.
I stood there in the freezing garage, the hum of the city waking up around us, feeling the solid, immovable foundation of my anger crumble into dust. For two years, I had nurtured my hatred like a precious seed, watering it with my loneliness, letting it grow into a shield that kept the world out.
And now he was telling me that every cruel word, every cold glance, every slammed door had been an act of warped, desperate self-preservation.
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"You're insane," I whispered, tears finally breaking free and rolling down my cheeks. "You're an arrogant, manipulative, sociopathic criminal, and you're insane."
"Maybe," Nico murmured, stepping closer until the warmth of his body radiated against the morning chill. He didn't touch me—he kept his hands carefully at his sides, respecting a boundary neither of us knew how to cross. "But my surgeon's private jet just touched down at O'Hare fifteen minutes ago. He’ll be at St. Catherine’s by six."
