Chapter 1 - The Crosshairs on the Glass
The heavy cord of the blackout blinds was rough against my calloused palm, the braided nylon digging into my skin as I stood frozen before the towering arched window of the master bedroom.
Outside, a late-autumn wind whipped through the towering bare oaks of the Gold Coast estate, hurling sleet against the leaded glass panes with a hollow, rhythmic rattle. Inside the room, the dim amber light of the bedside lamp carved deep, cavernous shadows across Liam Mercer’s face.
"Don't," he whispered again.
It was not the commanding roar that had sent seasoned mob lieutenants scrambling down the marble staircase, nor was it the venomous rasp that had driven six registered trauma nurses weeping into the street. It was a stripped, desperate sound, thin as paper and brittle as spun glass.
His six-foot-three frame, corded with scarred muscle and pinned to the bed by twenty pounds of stainless-steel external fixation pins through his right femur, was locked in rigid, absolute paralysis. His knuckles were bone-white where he gripped the edge of the Egyptian cotton duvet, his slate-gray eyes wide and fixated on my wrist.
I did not let go of the cord, but I did not pull it either.
"Liam," I said, keeping my voice down to that calm, low decibel I had perfected over five years in the Cook County trauma intensive care unit, where panic was contagious and usually fatal. "There’s an inch of clearance between the casement and the drape. If you turn your head toward the light every time the sun breaks through the clouds, you don't hate the day. You're tracking something."
"Step away from the glass, Nora," he commanded, his chest hitching beneath the fresh sterile bandages I had taped across his lower ribs two hours ago. The digital pulse oximeter on his index finger began to beep with an erratic, climbing rhythm: 88... 94... 104. "Step back. Right now."
I followed the line of his sight.
Through the narrow, vertical slit between the heavy velvet curtain and the mahogany frame, the upper tier of the neighboring limestone mansion across the private alley was visible. It was the former residence of an Austrian diplomat, empty for eighteen months, its roof line crowned with ornate copper gargoyles and a shaded attic dormer.
A high-angle perch. Five hundred and twenty yards. Direct line of sight into the headboard of this bed.
A cold, icy needle drove straight down my spine.
"The night you were hit," I murmured, my hand slowly loosening from the cord without disturbing the drape. "It wasn't a drive-by on the expressway, was it?"
Liam closed his eyes. The tension in his jaw muscles knotted so violently that a vein pulsed along his temple, stark and blue against his fever-pale skin.
"High-velocity tungsten round," he said, the words dragging out of him like scrap metal dragged over gravel. "Three hundred Winchester Magnum. It took the bone out of my femur while I was standing on the terrace of the Drake Hotel. Two inches higher and it would have severed the femoral artery. I would have bled out before Leo could drag me into the service corridor."
"And the shooter is still out there."
"The shooter," Liam whispered, opening his eyes, the gray pupils reflecting the dim bulb, "is waiting for the blinds to open. He knows I survived the surgery at Northwestern. He knows I was brought back here. He knows that an external fixator means I cannot move faster than two inches a second."
He let out a ragged, self-mocking breath that ended in a sharp wince of pain from his fractured ribs.
"He doesn't need to breach the iron gates. He doesn't need to fight thirty men with submachine guns in the courtyard. He just needs me to sit up in bed, look out at the lake, and want to feel like a man again for five seconds."
I stepped away from the window slowly, my soft rubber nursing shoes making no sound against the Persian wool carpet.
I walked over to the side of the bed, picked up the glass of ice water from the mahogany nightstand, and handed it to him. My hand did not shake. When your seven-year-old brother is in Ward 4 at Children’s Memorial fighting an acute lymphoblastic relapse that requires seventy-eight thousand dollars for an autologous chimeric antigen receptor trial, you don't have the luxury of giving in to another man's assassin.
Liam took the glass. His fingers brushed mine—rough, calloused, burning with the residual heat of his low-grade surgical fever.
"Who hired the rifle, Liam?" I asked.
May you like
He took a slow swallow, his throat working against the pain, and set the glass down.
"My second-in-command," Liam said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, subterranean register that made the hair on my arms stand on end. "Marcus Vance. The man who is currently sitting downstairs in my library, running my shipping terminals, and paying your ten-thousand-dollar weekly check."
