Four nurses had already fled the penthouse before midnight, and the fifth was stuffing medical supplies into her bag when security warned me that Chicago’s

The injection hit his bloodstream within two minutes.

I watched Gabriel’s pupils contract to pinpricks. A sudden, violent shudder rippled through his broad shoulders, and beads of cold sweat immediately broke out across his forehead. His heart monitor, which I was still tracking via a mobile app on my phone, leaped from 80 to 135 beats per minute.

"Breathe," I instructed, standing over him, my fingers pressed to the radial artery in his wrist. "Slow, deep diaphragmatic breaths. Don't fight the tachycardia."

Gabriel closed his eyes, his breathing sounding like a steam engine under heavy load. The color drained from his lips, replaced by an ashen hue, but the tremor in his legs suddenly ceased. The chemical flood had forced the neural pathways open; his quadriceps locked with unnatural, rigid tension.

"Get me up," he commanded through gritted teeth.

Luca stepped to his left side, and I took his right. We gripped his forearms, hoisting him upward.

Gabriel’s boots hit the hardwood with a dull thud. For a terrifying second, his knees buckled inward, his weight threatening to drag all three of us to the floor. I braced my hip against his, digging my heels into the rug, wrapping my arm around his broad torso to support his lower spine.

"Find your center," I whispered fiercely into his ear. "Look at the horizon, Gabriel. Don't look at your feet. Your brain needs visual proprioception to compensate for the nerve damage."

Gabriel’s head snapped up. His eyes locked onto the towering high-rises outside the panoramic window. He took a ragged breath, gritted his teeth until I heard the enamel grind, and shifted his weight.

He stood.

Six-foot-two of pure, unadulterated menace. Dressed in a tailored charcoal Brioni three-piece suit that masked the thick gauze dressing over his spine, his dark hair combed back, his silver-headed cane planted firmly into the floorboards, he looked completely indestructible. Nobody looking at him from three feet away would have ever guessed that his back was stitched with nylon and his veins were swimming with industrial neurotoxins.

"How does it feel?" Luca asked, his eyes shining with disbelief.

"Like walking on shattered glass," Gabriel rasped, his knuckles white on the lion's head cane. "Let's go."

Before we moved toward the elevator, I stopped by the penthouse kitchen to secure my medical bag. As I reached into the double-door stainless-steel refrigerator to grab the remaining vials of saline, something caught my eye.

On the bottom shelf, tucked behind several cartons of organic juice, sat a commercial IV infusion bag labeled *Normal Saline 0.9%*. It had been hung earlier that evening by the agency nurse who had fled before my arrival.

I pulled the bag out, holding it up to the fluorescent kitchen light.

The plastic port had two puncture marks instead of one. Floating near the bottom of the clear liquid was a faint, microscopic swirl of milky precipitate.

"Luca," I called out, my voice sharp and cold.

Luca appeared at the kitchen threshold, his gun resting in the shoulder holster beneath his jacket. "What's wrong?"

"Who supplied the IV fluids for Gabriel over the past week?"

Luca blinked. "The home-health courier from Midwest Private Care. Same agency you work for."

"This isn't saline," I said, tapping the plastic bag with my fingernail. "It's a continuous infusion of vecuronium bromide. A muscle relaxant used in general anesthesia to paralyze patients on ventilators. In micro-doses, it prevents skeletal muscle regeneration without causing immediate respiratory failure."

Luca’s face went completely blank. "The agency nurse... she wasn't just incompetent. She was an assassin."

"Vincent wasn't taking any chances," I said, dumping the bag into the sink and slicing it open with my scalpel, watching the poisoned fluid swirl down the drain. "The implant was the primary weapon. The IV bag was the insurance policy to make sure Gabriel never got out of that bed."

Gabriel stepped into the kitchen doorway. His walk was slow, deliberate, each step calculated to hide the rigid stiffness of his gait, but he was moving under his own power. He looked at the sliced IV bag in the sink, then looked at me.

"Your agency was compromised," Gabriel said, his voice deadly calm. "Vincent bought Midwest Private Care three weeks ago through a shell company in Delaware."

"Which means," I said, the realization hitting me like a cold wave, "my assignment here wasn't a coincidence. They sent four nurses who were paid to let you die. When I arrived and actually started diagnosing you, I ruined their timeline."

"And that," Gabriel said, tapping the silver cane against the marble threshold, "is why Marco Ramos is waiting in the lobby with six men. He's not here to check on me. He's here to ensure that neither of us ever leaves this building."

Gabriel reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a heavy gold signet ring bearing the Moretti family crest—a crowned wolf over an anchor—and slid it onto his right ring finger.

"Luca, call the freight elevator. We go down to the basement storage depot, take the laundry corridor into the adjoining hotel, and exit through the Drake Hotel lobby."

"And Marco?" Luca asked.

Gabriel’s lips curved into a cold, terrifying smile that sent adrenaline surging through my blood.