Brin Holloway.
The bartender from his club.
The woman who had once slept with her hand open over his heart as if she trusted it.
The woman he had looked in the eye nine months earlier and told, “You don’t belong in this world.”
Then he had put on his suit jacket and walked out.
He had called it protection.
She had called it abandonment.
And now she was here.
Pregnant.
Dying.
His mind did what men like him trained their minds to do under pressure: it calculated.
Nine months.
The apartment behind the club.
The whiskey.
The silence.
The last night.
The way she had cried and turned away so he wouldn’t see.
The way he had pretended not to hear because if he let himself hear it, he might stay.
Nine months.
Every number led to the same answer.
The blood drained from his face.
Royce, the closest of his bodyguards, stepped through the doorway and leaned in. “Boss,” he said quietly, “that’s the old bartender from Vesper Row, right? You want me to find out where they’re taking her?”
Cormack stared at the closing doors behind the gurney.
“No,” he said.
Royce blinked. “No?”
“No one touches her. No one pressures anyone. No one says her name. Stay back.”
Yara turned in her chair, sharp and annoyed. “Cormack, what is wrong with you?”
He didn’t answer.
The hydraulic doors sealed shut with a soft hiss, but in his chest it sounded like a prison gate slamming.
For the first time in twenty-two years, Cormack Hale felt helpless in a way guns, lawyers, cash, and violence could not solve.
He was on his feet before he realized he had stood.
He moved fast, crossing the polished floor, turning down the maternity corridor, ignoring Yara calling his name behind him. At the central nurses’ station, a middle-aged nurse with silver threaded through her dark hair looked up from a chart.
The Mafia Boss Walked Into the Hospital With His New Lover
