Chapter 3
PRIYA
Cold air pushes up through the floorboards.
The draft is new. My morning routine operates on a precise, unyielding schedule.
The alarm goes off at six. The coffee finishes brewing at six-fifteen.
The stretching routine targets the stiffness in my left knee from six-thirty to six-forty.
Every minute is accounted for. Each variable is controlled.
Structure is the only thing standing between me and the memory of shattered glass and fire.
The building next to my clinic going up in flames taught me about chaos.
Chaos takes everything. Order keeps you alive.
Today, the order is broken.
The draft swirling around my ankles smells wrong.
Wood shavings. Fresh paint. A harsh, chemical tang of high-grade industrial solvent.
None of those scents belong in my run-down Chicago walk-up.
The building has been mostly abandoned for eight months, save for my unit on the third floor and the half-finished renovations the landlord never bothered to complete below me.
The landlord lives in Florida and barely cashes my rent checks.
No one fixes anything. No one paints anything.
My boots hit the hardwood floor of the hallway.
The temperature drops another five degrees outside my apartment door.
I lock the deadbolt. I test the handle twice.
The stairwell stretches out below me, bathed in the gray, anemic light of a Chicago dawn.
Dust motes dance in the cold shafts of illumination.
I take the first step down. My left knee gives a dull, familiar throb.
The barometer is dropping. A storm is coming off the lake.
I compensate automatically, shifting my weight to my right hip, a minor biomechanical adjustment I have perfected over the last three years.
The descent usually takes exactly forty-two seconds.
Today, I stop at the second-floor landing.
The door to apartment 2B is open.
My blood goes cold. The unit has been vacant since a chaotic eviction last spring.
The landlord screwed a heavy piece of plywood over the shattered doorframe and left it to rot.
Nobody has touched it since. Until, apparently, last night.
The plywood is gone. The half-finished reinforced frame the landlord abandoned months ago has been completed overnight.
A steel door now stands slightly ajar, fitted with a matte black biometric keypad above a deadbolt that looks like it belongs on a bank vault.
I slept through all of it, the white-noise machine I run every night drowning the world into static.
A shadow moves inside the apartment.
Adrenaline spikes through my system. Fight or flight kicks in, hard and fast. My grip tightens on the strap of my medical bag. I should turn around, run back up the stairs, call the police.
A man steps out of the shadows and fills the doorframe.
The air leaves my lungs in a single, violent rush.
Salt, iron, and sun-baked earth hit my senses. The scent is heavy, consuming the narrow stairwell. It erases the dust and the old wood. It erases the chill. It wraps around me like a physical weight.
Nico.
He stands exactly where he stood on the street last night, with that same unnatural stillness.
He wears a black tactical shirt stretched taut across his muscled chest. Cargo pants tuck into worn combat boots.
The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up to his elbows.
Tribal and geometric tattoos wrap around his forearms, vanishing under the fabric. His eyes lock onto mine.
He doesn't look surprised to see me. He looks like a spider waiting in the center of a web.
Anger immediately burns through the ice of my fear. The audacity of this man is staggering. He tracked me. He threatened me on the sidewalk. Now he is inside my sanctuary.
"What the hell are you doing in my building?" The words snap out of my mouth like a whip.
Nico watches me. His assessing gaze tracks from my face, down my body, stopping at my left knee.
"You favor the left." His voice is a low, rough gravel that scrapes against the acoustic walls of the stairwell. "Cartilage tear? Meniscus?"
The accuracy of his question throws me off balance. I expected a threat. I expected a mobster cliché. I did not expect a diagnostic evaluation from a man who looks like he kills people for a living.
"Excuse me?" I square my shoulders. "I asked you a question. Did you break into this apartment?"
"The plywood was rotting." Nico steps fully into the threshold. His sheer size dominates the landing. The ceiling suddenly seems too low. The walls seem too close. "A strong breeze could have kicked that door in. Your security system is a joke, Priya."
Hearing my name in his mouth sends a sharp, involuntary jolt straight down to my toes. I hate the way he says it. I hate that he makes it sound like an ancient, sacred vow.
"My security is none of your business." I grip the railing. "You need to leave. Right now. I'm calling the police."
Nico reaches into his pocket. He doesn't rush.
He doesn't flinch. He pulls out a set of keys and tosses them onto a small wooden table inside the door.
"The police won't care. My family has leverage over the property's holding company in Florida.
The lease was signed through their management firm last night.
The keys were waiting for me in a lockbox.
I have permission to upgrade the locks."
Heat crawls up the back of my neck. "You rented the apartment below me."
"I secured the perimeter," Nico corrects me.
"This isn't a military base." I gesture wildly to the peeling wallpaper. "This is a residential building. My residential building. You can't just move in here because you decided to play stalker."
"You walked out of your clinic last night." Nico takes half a step forward. The space between us vanishes. The air practically hums with tension. "Right next to a building you had no business being near. You put yourself on a board you don't understand. I'm taking you off the board."
"By moving into the apartment below me?" I shoot back, my sarcasm acting as a flimsy shield against the overwhelming force of his presence. "Brilliant maneuver. What's next? Are you going to set up sandbags in the laundry room?"
Nico doesn't smile. His expression remains stone. But something dangerous flares in his eyes. "If I have to."
He thinks he can just grunt at me and I’ll obey. He thinks his alpha-male brooding is going to make me collapse into a puddle of compliant female gratitude. Please. I deal with stubborn, aggressive men complaining about their physical limitations for a living. I’m not intimidated by muscle.
I narrow my eyes and really look at him. The physical therapist in my brain overrides the terrified woman.
Nico is a large man. He holds himself with absolute control.
But the kinetic chain of his body tells a different story.
His left shoulder sits a fraction of an inch higher than his right.
When he reached for the keys in his pocket, he rotated his entire torso instead of letting the humerus articulate naturally within the socket.
The deltoid muscle is rigidly engaged, acting as a splint.
"You're compensating," I state flatly.
Nico stops. The terrifying stillness intensifies. "What?"
"Your left shoulder." I point directly at his collarbone.
"You have zero internal rotation. You're guarding your ribs on the left side, too.
The oblique is locked up. You took a hit.
A bad one. Recently. You're hiding it well, but your trapezius muscle is carrying the entire load of your arm.
Give it three days and you'll have a tension migraine so bad you won't be able to see straight. "
Total silence fills the stairwell.
Nico stares at me. The assessing look in his eyes shifts.
It fractures into something raw, primal, and deeply unsettled.
He is a man who builds fortresses. He is a man who hides his weaknesses behind reinforced steel and tactical planning.
I just walked right past his defenses and read his pain like an open book.
"You're very observant."
"It's my job." I lift my chin. "I fix broken bodies. And yours is definitely broken."
"My body is fine." Nico's voice drops an octave. The sound rolls through the wooden landing and up the soles of my boots.
"Your body is a mess of poorly healed trauma and overcompensating muscle groups." I snap back, refusing to back down. "And considering you just moved an entire apartment's worth of furniture in overnight, you probably tore whatever scar tissue was trying to form. You're an idiot."
Nico steps closer. He looms over me, a tower of tattoos and suppressed violence. "Are you always this vicious before breakfast?"
"Only to men who stalk me and break into my building." I don’t take a step back. I refuse to give him the satisfaction. "Move. I have to go to work."
"I'll drive you."
"Absolutely not."
"Priya." The gravel in his voice turns into concrete. "You’re not walking out of this building alone."
"Watch me."
I push past him. Or, I try to. Nico simply shifts his weight, turning his frame into an impenetrable barricade. He doesn't touch me. He doesn't grab my arm. He just exists in the space I need to occupy. It is infuriating.
"Move," I demand, glaring at his chest. Looking up at his face feels too dangerous.
"The streets are not safe today." Nico looks down at me. His lashes frame eyes that hold the weight of decades of violence. "There’s a shift happening. The Bellanti armory next to your clinic is being scrubbed by people who don’t leave loose ends.
You walked out right beside it. You are a loose end. "