Chapter 13 - Red Stilettos and Poison
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Nora eased the heavy steel door of the scrub-prep room shut until only a hairline crack remained at the hinge, plunging their tiny alcove into darkness while she clamped a hand gently over the waking Leo’s mouth, signaling him to stay dead silent.
Through the narrow gap, she saw the main suite door swing open.
Camila Morelli clicked across the tile floor in her red stilettos, lowering a pair of designer sunglasses as she stared at the empty space where the hospital bed had been ten seconds earlier, only wet wheel tracks leading toward the bathroom door—which Nora had purposefully left swinging slightly ajar as a false trail.
"Check the bathroom," Camila snapped in a cold, cultured Manhattan accent, drawing a compact nickel-plated Beretta from the pocket of her stolen lab coat.
As the two massive gunmen moved toward the bathroom at the far side of the room with their submachine guns raised, Nora silently pushed the crash bar on the rear biohazard corridor door behind her, rolling Leo’s gurney out into the service passage.
The metal wheel of the portable dialysis stand caught on the raised brass threshold with a sharp clink.
Camila’s head whipped around instantly toward the scrub room door.
"The prep room!" Camila hissed.
Nora shoved Leo’s gurney and the rolling machine with all her strength through the heavy fire doors of the service freight elevator twenty feet down the passage, where an armed hospital security officer was holding the car for transport.
"Take him straight down to the basement security bunker! Lock the car down!" Nora cried, hitting the DOOR CLOSE override button from the outside corridor just as Camila and her two gunmen burst out of the scrub room thirty feet away.
"Nora, no!" Leo shouted as the heavy steel elevator doors slammed shut between them, sealing him safely inside the descending car.
Nora spun around in the narrow white corridor, backs against the closed elevator doors, completely unarmed as the two gunmen leveled their MP7s at her chest.
"Don't shoot her yet!" Camila ordered sharply, raising a manicured hand as she clicked down the hallway, her cold blue eyes raking over Nora from head to toe with toxic amusement. "So. This is the little charity case who made Julian Vane cry in a butler’s pantry."
Nora kept her chin up, breathing evenly despite the icy sweat on her spine. "And you’re the coward who blew up a twenty-one-year-old college kid because you didn't have the nerve to look Julian in the eye."
Camila’s aristocratic face twisted with sudden, vicious rage. She stepped up and struck Nora across the cheek with the cold steel barrel of the Beretta, splitting the skin over her cheekbone.
Nora tasted blood, staggering against the elevator frame, but refused to drop her gaze.
"Matteo was collateral damage in a merger Julian refused to sign," Camila spat, pressing the muzzle of the Beretta directly under Nora’s chin, forcing her head back against the steel doors. "Do you have any idea how humiliating it was? A year of wearing his ring at every gala in New York and Chicago, and the man never once looked at me the way he looked when Marcus sent me the security stills of him carrying your groceries in Uptown!"
"He didn't love you because there’s nothing inside you to love," Nora whispered fiercely.
Camila’s eyes narrowed into slits. "Grab her," she told the two bodyguards. "Since the kid went down to the basement, we’re taking the maid back to the Waldorf. Let’s see if Julian signs over the Calumet Harbor terminals when I start sending him pieces of his favorite servant in Tiffany boxes."
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Just as the larger gunman reached for Nora’s throat, the stairwell fire door at the end of the hall blew open off its latch.
Julian stepped through the smoke of a flashbang grenade he had tossed ahead of him—ears protected, eyes blazing like hellfire, firing two suppressed handguns with terrifying, mechanical lethality.
