Chapter 10 - Stitches in the Dark
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Instead of returning to Lake Forest or heading to a hospital where police reports would be mandatory for gunshot wounds, Dario drove the Maybach straight into the subterranean private garage of the Vane Tower in downtown Chicago.
An express freight elevator carried them directly to the sixty-eighth-floor penthouse—a sleek, glass-walled fortress floating inside the low clouds over Lake Michigan.
Within ten minutes, Leo was safely tucked into a massive guest bedroom down the hall with a plate of warm food and an armed guard stationed outside his door, exhausted enough that the adrenaline crash had knocked him out almost immediately after Nora promised she wouldn't leave the apartment.
In the master bathroom, Nora stood beside the marble sink under the harsh recessed lighting, laying out sterile gauze, antiseptic, lidocaine, and curved suture needles from Julian’s trauma kit.
Julian sat shirtless on the edge of the marble tub enclosure, a towel draped across his lap.
Nora tried very hard to keep her eyes strictly on the four-inch laceration across his left deltoid, where the 9mm round had torn a deep trench through the muscle. It was nearly impossible. Beneath the tailored suits, Julian Vane’s body was a roadmap of survival—broad, heavily muscled shoulders, a lean torso ridged with iron, and three older silver bullet scars across his ribs and flank.
"Dario said the family surgeon is thirty minutes out in traffic," Nora said quietly, tearing open an alcohol swab with steady hands. "If we wait, the swelling makes the stitches ragged. Seven years of taking care of a kid on home peritoneal dialysis taught me sterile protocol and basic suturing."
"Then stitch me up, nurse," Julian murmured, watching her face intently. "Skip the lidocaine."
"Don't be ridiculous, sir. I'm not sewing your skin raw when there’s local anesthetic right here."
"The lidocaine takes ten minutes to numb the tissue, and you’re about ten seconds away from passing out on your feet from shock," Julian said softly. He caught her wrist gently with his good hand. "Do it now so you can sleep."
She looked into his eyes, saw that he wouldn't budge, and gave a sharp nod. Stepping between his knees to get the proper angle under the light, she cleaned the wound with chlorhexidine. The muscle in his shoulder bunched like iron cable beneath her fingertips, and his breath hissed sharply between his teeth, yet he didn't pull back an inch.
As she threaded the black nylon suture through the skin with practiced precision, tying off the first knot, his large right hand came to rest warm and heavy against the curve of her hip over her jeans, steadying himself.
Every nerve ending in Nora’s body lit up like a live wire.
"Why New York?" she whispered, focusing desperately on the third stitch so her hands wouldn't shake. "Dario said the SUVs had New York plates. That means Pietro Morelli—Camila’s father."
"Marcus wasn't working for the Russians," Julian said, his voice a low rumble inches from her collarbone. "When Dario raided Marcus’s apartment an hour ago, they found wire transfers from a shell company in Manhattan. Camila didn't just try to kill me four months ago and disappear. She’s been running her father’s Chicago infiltration from the shadows. And when Marcus sent her that audio recording from the linen room last night..."
Nora tied off the fifth and final stitch, snipping the thread cleanly before pressing a sterile pad over the closed wound. Her eyes lifted to his.
"She realized I wasn't just a maid," Nora breathed. "She heard you say you needed me. So she decided to do to me and Leo what she tried to do to you and Matteo."
Julian’s hand slid from her hip up to the back of her neck, his thumb brushing the racing pulse below her ear. The look in his gray eyes was dark, possessive, and stripped of every shred of corporate polish.
"Four months ago, I swore I would never let anyone know what could break me again," Julian whispered, pulling her an inch closer between his knees. "And then you opened your door at two in the morning in a cheap cotton nightgown and told me to sit down."
Nora’s breath caught as his forehead rested against hers. "Mr. Vane—"
"Say my name, Nora," he commanded huskily. "Just once, when nobody can hear us."
May you like
"Julian," she whispered.
His mouth came down on hers—not rough, as she might have feared from a man built of violence, but slow, devastatingly deep, and aching with one hundred and seven nights of loneliness. Nora’s hands, freshly washed and trembling, came up to rest against the bare, warm muscle of his uninjured chest, her lips parting beneath his before a sharp knock rattled the outer suite door.
