Chapter 84 - Antonio
This corridor is a sterile, suffocating tube of flickering fluorescent lights mingled with the pervasive, astringent smell of antiseptic. My shoes, usually silent on marble or carpet make a sickeningly loud squeaky scuff, scuff, scuff, against the polished linoleum with every pace.
Ten steps.
Pivot.
Ten steps back.
I’m a caged animal on a short, unforgiving chain.
Each swing of my arms is a tight, controlled motion, my fists clenched so hard the bones in my hands ache.
I can’t stop moving. If I stop, the silence will rush in.
And in that silence, there is only the phantom image of Grace lifting up that pistol, placing it into her mouth and pulling the trigger.
They took her from me on a gurney, her face pale as wax, a mask held over what remained of her face. One team for her, another for our unborn child. Our baby. The words the doctor used are burned into my skull.
‘Massive haemorrhage. Emergency caesarean to save the infant. Then we’ll try to save your wife.’
Try. It’s the most terrifying word in the English language.
I’ve faced down men with guns I’ve negotiated mergers worth billions, I’ve stood in rooms where a single wrong word would mean a bullet in the brain. I have never, ever felt this out of control.
This utterly, completely powerless.
My money means nothing here.
My influence is a joke.
All I can do is wear a groove in this fucking floor and pray to God and hope he listens.
I pivot on my heel for the hundredth time, my gaze sweeping the empty corridor, and I freeze.
He’s there. Leaning against the wall by the water cooler, as if he’s been waiting for a bus. Devin Fucking Blake. Dressed in his usual dark, nondescript clothing, his face a mask of calm neutrality.
A hot, irrational fury spikes through the cold fear in my veins.
Why is he always there, a vulture circling whenever my life is about to crater? A silent, ominous shadow at the edge of every bloody catastrophe. He’s a goddamn harbinger.
“What do you want?” The words come out as a low growl, raw and abrasive. I don’t have the energy for politeness, for the careful dance of our usual interactions.
Devin pushes off the wall, his movements economical, precise. He doesn’t approach, respecting the invisible barrier of my rage. “I came to update you. The ruse worked.”
I just stare at him, my mind struggling to shift gears from the life-and-death reality of this hospital to the shadow war he represents.
“Konstantine’s apparent assassination,” he continues, his voice level. “The Esau took the bait. They’re out in the open, celebrating. Makes them easy to find. They’re being hunted down as we speak.”
I give a sharp, jerky nod. Good. Let them all burn. Let every last one of them pay for what they did to us, for what they’ve done to my Grace. The thought is a dark, satisfying ember in the cold ash of my fear.
“And we have the last of Ines’s murderers,” Devin adds, his eyes never leaving mine. “They’re being taken to Konstantine’s house to be dealt with. Justice, of a sort.”
Justice. It feels like a hollow concept right now. It won’t guarantee my wife opens her eyes again.
I’m about to tell him to leave, that his war and his supposed justice mean nothing in this sterile purgatory when another figure detaches from the shadows at the far end of the corridor.
My breath hitches. For a dizzying second, I think I’m hallucinating from stress, from grief. But no. He steps into the light, and there’s no mistaking that face, the sharp cheekbones, the silver-streaked hair.
Konstantine.
He’s smiling. A small, triumphant curve of his lips. He holds his hands out, palms up in a gesture of benevolent conclusion. “Antonio. I told you. Everything went exactly to plan.”
The air leaves my lungs. The sheer, unmitigated gall of it. The absurdity.
I don’t think about the fact his brother is dead, I don’t think about the fact we murdered him and God knows how many other Brethren Lords to save ourselves. All I can think about is my wife being torn apart on an operating table right now.
The fury that was a spike before becomes a tidal wave. I take a step forward, my body vibrating with it. “My wife is on an operating table, fighting for her life,” I say, my voice dangerously low. “They had to cut our child out of her to save it. None of this… none of this went to plan.”
Konstantine’s smile doesn’t falter, but it softens into something that might, on another man, pass for sympathy.
He draws a low breath; the sound exaggerated in the quiet hall.
“She is alive, Antonio. And I have it on good authority that your child will live. You have a boy.” He lets the word hang there for a beat, watching me.
“Sure he will need a little help these first few months, but he’s a fighter already, just like his parents. Just like his dad.”
The world tilts. The roaring in my ears recedes, replaced by a single, piercing tone.
A boy.
I have a son? I have a son.
The information lands not with joy, but with a seismic, terrifying thud in my soul. A son. A tiny, vulnerable life that is mine to protect in a world that I know to be viciously, randomly cruel. The weight of it is immense, a gravitational pull that threatens to buckle my knees.
I am a father. I am a father!
The monumental truth is still settling over me, a blanket of awe and sheer terror when the doors to the operating theatre swing open.
A surgeon emerges, still in his blue scrubs, a cap masking his hair.
His face is etched with a deep fatigue but his eyes, his eyes hold a light that wasn’t there before.
He pulls off his mask. “Mr Macrae?”
I’m across the corridor in three strides, Devin and Konstantine forgotten. “Yes.”
“Your wife is stable,” he says, and the words are a key unlocking the iron bands around my chest. I sway on my feet, grabbing the wall for support.
“It was touch and go. We’ve induced a coma to give her body and brain time to heal without any additional stress.
She’ll need to remain under for a few weeks. ”
A coma. The relief is brutal and incomplete.
“And her eye?” I hear myself ask. She blew the right side of her face off. Did they stitch it back together like a patchwork quilt?
The surgeon offers a small, genuine smile. “We managed to save her sight. The trauma was significant, but the optic nerve was intact. There will be recovery, rehabilitation, but the prognosis is good.”
Tears I didn’t know I was capable of well up, hot and blinding. I blink them back furiously, refusing to let them fall. Not here. Not in front of them. But the gratitude is a physical pain. “Thank you. Doctor. Thank you.”
He nods, weary but satisfied. “You can see her in a moment. She’s been moved to ICU.”
“I want to see her. Now.”
He gestures for me to follow. I don’t look back at the two men I left standing in the corridor. My entire being is focused on the doors, on the path to my wife.
But as I step across the threshold, a cold prickle, entirely separate from the fear and the relief travels down my spine.
I glance back.
Devin and Konstantine are still there, watching me go. Devin is a statue, unreadable as ever. But Konstantine, he stands perfectly straight, his hands clasped behind his back, a portrait of victorious authority.
And the thought comes, unbidden, a tiny splinter in my mind.
Konstantine doesn’t stand like that.
The memory is crisp, clear. The last time I saw him, he’d leaned ever so slightly to the left, a subtle but permanent favouring of his right side.
This man in the hallway stands with a ramrod, symmetrical straightness.
The splinter digs deeper, festering.
Surely that’s not… No, the thought is too absurd to finish but it takes root anyway, a seed of doubt in the freshly turned soil of my reality.
I turn my back on them, the question burning a hole in my mind, and follow the doctor into the intensive care unit, into the humming, beeping sanctuary where my wife lies waiting.
The outside world, with its lies and its shadows, can wait.