Page 31

Before my brother has a chance to speak, sounds drift through the door. Words.

"—but no, you can move, thank you⁠—"

Manon comes through it sideways with Daniel behind her, both hands up like a man in surrender. Every house I own is open to her, no locked doors, no schedule—it's my own policy, so I should blame myself that she's here. My attorney said it was madness. But I insisted that it would be the law in my world.

She's in a coat over scrubs with a wad of paper crushed in her fist. Between her and me there's a man strapped to a chair, missing two fingers, screaming. Blood on my carpet, blood on my throat, a pair of open rib shears in Rafe's hand. She doesn't seem to notice any of it. Her eyes find me across the length of the room and she starts shouting before the door has finished closing behind her.

"You bought a hospital!"

Nobody dares to move or breathe.

"It took me four nights to trace it. Shell company inside a shell company, the Caymans, then Delaware, then some trust in Liechtenstein, and a very confused woman in the medical library helping me chase every one of them down. And they all lead back to you. You own Meridian. The whole network. The four hospitals, the institutes, nine thousand people, including me. You signed for it on the twelfth." The paper hits my chest and drops to the carpet. "We got engaged on the sixth. Six days before you bought the place I work, you psychotic⁠—"

"Manon—"

"No. You don't get to say my name in that tone. Like you care." She stays where she is, by the door. "My father buys customs officials. My father buys judges and police captains and thinks it makes him Napoleon. You bought a hospital because you didn't like my schedule. You're out of your damn mind."

Somewhere to the side, Wes is still sobbing.

"Do you know what you sound like? You sound like a man who ends up being talked about in a documentary, where people will say ‘something was off about him’..."

Her badge is flipped the wrong way on her waistband. There's a coffee ring on her cuff. God knows how long her shift was and she's driven straight here to give me hell because I bought the place where she works. I want to cross the room, kiss her mouth, put my tongue down her throat, and find out exactly what she'd do. I don't move.

"—and put a sheet under him, for God's sake. That carpet's finished. Are you listening to me?"

"Every word."

"Then say something. One thing, without the act."

"I removed the board so nobody on this earth can mess with you without coming through me first."

She lets out a short, frustrated squeak that shoots blood straight to my cock, and then she reaches into her bag. Her face tightens, and I know I'm in trouble.

I have time to move. I could step aside, put a chair between us, grab a laptop and raise it to my face, tell Rafe to grab her before she does whatever she's about to do, but I'm too mesmerized by her to make a move.

A split second later, Manon produces a scalpel. A disposable one, the little kind they keep on every ward. She flicks the sheath off with her thumb, then throws it at me.

She's all the way across the room now, closer. Ten feet, maybe eleven, but the blade goes through my shirt into my left shoulder, just below the collarbone, into the meat, deep enough to stay.

Six weapons come up at once, aimed at her.

“Nobody fucking dare shoot!”

Rafe freezes with the shears half raised, so does Tomek. Two men on the door have their sights on the future mother of my children.

"Down. Rafe. Now."

I don't feel a thing. There's just a hot pull under the collarbone where the scalpel is, and then something warm running down my chest, and the whole arm going heavy and numb from the shoulder down. I've stitched this exact wound in other men. I can tell how deep it's gone in, how far the blade is sitting in the muscle, and I can tell she missed everything that would have killed me. She must have done it on purpose. She was furious enough to put a blade in me, but even then she went nowhere near the artery or the lung. She wanted to hurt me, or scare me, or make a point. She didn't want me dead.

She's filleted me like a steak tenderloin, and my reaction to a blade in the shoulder, apparently, is to get an erection I could hang a coat on. Most men would take a moment to reflect on that. I take a moment to wonder if she'd do it again.

There is something wrong with me. I've known it for years. What just happened confirmed it.

Twenty years in this business. I've been shot at in a parking lot, run off the road, had men come for me with knives, and every single one of them was paid by someone to be there and do that. Every one of them had to work himself up to it first, stand out in the dark and find the nerve to come at the great Laszlo Novak.

Not one of them did what she just did: face me down with her chin up, zero hesitation, her whole face telling me there's plenty more where that came from.

And God help me, I like it.