Chapter 4 - Blood on the Velvet and the Oath in the Dark
The noise in the enclosed concrete garage was apocalyptic.
Rounds shattered against the steel panels of the luxury cars, sending showers of
sparks, pulverized concrete, and jagged glass spraying over us. The smell of
burning cordite and vaporized motor oil choked my throat.
Above me, Kieran didn't flinch. His heavy body acted as an impenetrable human
shield, his arms locked around my head, his chest absorbing the violent
vibrations of the barrage.
With his right hand, he reached into his tuxedo jacket with fluid, practiced
precision, pulling a custom black semi-automatic pistol from its holster beneath
his left shoulder.
He didn't fire blindly. He waited, his breath steady and hot against my ear,
counting the rhythmic bursts of the attackers' weapons.
Seven... eight... nine... click.
The split-second reload pause.
Kieran surged upward from behind the wheel well like a striking panther. He
extended his arm and fired three deafening, double-tap shots into the darkness.
A choked scream echoed through the garage, followed by the heavy clatter of a
rifle hitting the concrete.
From the far end of the garage, the tires of Kieran’s Suburban roared to life.
His driver, a scarred veteran named Lev, rammed the massive armored vehicle
directly into the second shooter, pinning him against a concrete support pillar
with a sickening crunch of metal.
Silence slammed back down over the parking deck, heavy, ringing, and
suffocating.
Kieran dropped back down to his knees beside me. His face was smeared with gray
concrete dust, his dark hair disheveled, but his gray eyes were burning with
pure, unadulterated fury.
"Mila," he choked out, his hands moving frantically over my shoulders, my arms,
my face. "Are you hit? Look at me. Are you hit?"
"I'm okay," I gasped, trembling so violently my teeth were chattering. "I'm
okay, I'm... Kieran, your arm."
Down the sleeve of his tailored midnight-blue jacket, a dark, heavy stain of
crimson was spreading rapidly through the fine wool, dripping from his cuff onto
the cold floor.
"It's a graze," he snarled dismissively, pulling me up to my feet with one arm
as Lev and two other armed men burst from the Suburban, weapons raised, securing
the perimeter.
"Secure the exits!" Kieran barked at his men, his voice shaking the concrete
walls. "Nobody leaves this hotel! Bring me whoever organized the valet shifts
tonight!"
"Sir, you're bleeding out," Lev said, rushing forward with a medical kit.
"Get her in the car," Kieran ordered, ignoring his own wound.
"No!" I shouted, the ER nurse in me violently overpowering the terrified
socialite. I grabbed Kieran's uninjured arm, forcing him to look at me. "The
bullet tore the brachial artery sheath, Kieran! Look at the pulse rate of that
bleed! If you get in that car without a tourniquet, you'll lose consciousness
before we reach Lake Shore Drive!"
Kieran stared down at me, the ice in his eyes flickering with shock at my tone.
I ripped the long silk sash from the waist of my emerald dress. With hands that
suddenly stopped shaking, fueled by seven years of trauma bay instinct, I
wrapped the silk high around his bicep, looped it through itself, grabbed a
heavy brass pen from Kieran’s breast pocket, and twisted it down until the
arterial flow choked to a dead halt.
Kieran hissed through his teeth, his jaw clenching as the pain hit him, but he
didn't pull away.
"Get us to the Lakeview penthouse," I commanded Lev, stepping into the armored
vehicle and pulling Kieran in after me. "Now!"
Twenty minutes later, we were inside the private medical suite located on the
top floor of Kieran’s fortified Lakeview tower.
I had stripped off my blood-stained silk dress, throwing on a pair of sterile
surgical scrubs from his cabinet. Kieran sat on the edge of the examination
table, his shirt cut away, revealing a torso mapped with old scars—faded knife
lines across his ribs, a round bullet entry near his collarbone from years
ago—and the fresh, jagged furrow along his upper arm where the rifle round had
torn the flesh.
I worked in absolute silence, cleaning the wound with iodine, numbing the
perimeter with lidocaine, and threading a curved suture needle through his torn
skin.
Kieran didn't make a single sound. He just watched me. His gaze was so heavy, so
intimate, that the heat in the small room felt stifling.
"You didn't run," he said quietly, the needle pulling the flesh tight beneath my
fingers.
"I don't leave dying people on concrete floors," I replied, tying off a knot
with surgical precision.
"I wasn't dying."
"You were bleeding like a stuck pig, Mr. Voss. Be quiet and let me finish the
sub-dermal layer."
A tiny, breathless laugh escaped his chest. "You're the only person on earth who
talks to me like that."
"Then the people around you are idiots." I snipped the suture thread, cleaned
the wound with gauze, and taped a sterile pressure dressing over the repair. My
adrenaline was finally beginning to crash, leaving my limbs hollow and
trembling.
I stepped back, washing my hands in the stainless steel sink. The water ran pink
down the drain.
"Marcus did this," I said, my back turned to him.
The silence in the room instantly dropped twenty degrees.
"What did you say?" Kieran’s voice was deadly low.
I turned around, wiping my hands on a paper towel. "Garrett pulled a tracker off
my car this morning. He told me Marcus put it there. He told me Marcus was
waiting for a moment when you were distracted by me to execute you."
Kieran slowly rose from the table. The raw, terrifying aura of the crime boss
filled the room once more, his presence towering and dark.
"Garrett told you this?"
"Yes."
Kieran walked slowly toward me, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "And you
didn't tell me immediately?"
"Garrett said if I told you, you'd start a war that would burn the entire south
side down!" I shouted, tears of frustration and terror finally spilling over my
eyelashes. "I was trying to keep people from dying, Kieran! I have a
five-year-old boy asleep in an apartment three miles from here! I can't be part
of an empire where people get shot in valet garages!"
Kieran stopped inches from me. He reached out, his uninjured hand cupping the
back of my neck, pulling my forehead gently against his broad, bare chest. I
could hear the heavy, steady thud of his heart beneath my ear.
"Listen to me, Mila," he murmured, his voice trembling with an emotion so deep
it sounded broken. "I swore an oath when my father died that I would pull this
family out of the gutter. I have spent five years cleaning our contracts,
legalizing our logistics, cutting off the Thorne family’s heroin lines through
the Great Lakes."
He pulled back slightly, forcing me to look into his eyes.
"Marcus isn't moving against me because I'm weak," Kieran whispered. "He's
moving against me because I'm shutting down his dirty money. And Garrett..." He
hesitated, a flash of deep, unresolved pain crossing his features. "Garrett
doesn't know how to live in the light. He never has."
He leaned down and kissed me.
It wasn't gentle like before. It was fierce, desperate, full of the blood and
gunpowder we had just survived. His lips claimed mine with an intensity that
stole every rational thought from my brain, and I gripped the bare skin of his
shoulders, kissing him back with all the terror and passion burning in my chest.
When he finally pulled away, resting his forehead against mine, my breath came
in ragged gasps.
"Tomorrow morning, I move you and Noah into this building," Kieran whispered
against my lips. "No arguments. The street is no longer safe."
Before I could answer, the red emergency phone on the wall of the medical suite
shrieked into the silence.
Kieran reached over and answered, hitting the speaker button.
"Voss," he said.
May you like
It was Mrs. Kowalski’s voice on the line, hysterical, sobbing so hard she could
barely form words.
"Mila! Mr. Voss! Please God, come quickly! Noah... Noah collapsed at breakfast!
He's not breathing right! His lips are blue! The ambulance is taking him to St.
Clement's right now!"
