Chapter 6 - The Broken Cage
Saturday was forty-eight hours away.
Forty-eight hours before Julian and Vance staged Maxwell’s final, lethal "medical emergency" in front of Providence's elite.
The next two days became an agonizing covert war. While the rest of Rourke House bustled with caterers, florists, and armed security guards prepping for the annual Waterfront Merchants' Gala, the third-floor bedroom was transformed into a clandestine rehabilitation camp.
Every time Delaney left for the market, I locked the door.
"Again," I urged, standing directly in front of Maxwell.
His teeth were gritted, his jaw clenched so tight I feared he would crack an enamel crown. He had his hands planted on the heavy mahogany bedposts. His knees were trembling like dried reeds in an autumn gale, but his feet—bare against the Persian rug—were flat on the floor.
He was standing.
"My hips... feel like glass," he growled, sweat pouring into his eyes.
"Lean your weight forward," I coached, keeping my arms hooked under his elbows, my body pressed close enough to catch him the instant his balance failed. "Your glutes have to engage. Trust your proprioception, Maxwell. Don't look down. Look at the mirror."
He lifted his head. In the full-length gilded mirror across the room, the image was staggering.
Maxwell Rourke was not a small man. Standing fully upright, he topped six-foot-two, with broad shoulders and an intimidating, broad-shouldered frame that dwarfed mine. For fourteen months, everyone had looked down at him in a wheelchair.
Now, he looked like a titan rising from a stone tomb.
"How long?" he asked through ragged breaths.
"Forty seconds," I whispered, feeling the raw, trembling power in his biceps under my hands. "Ten more seconds."
His balance wavered. His left knee buckled inward.
"I’ve got you," I said, throwing my hip against his to brace him.
The momentum carried us both toward the edge of the bed. Maxwell caught himself with one massive arm, pulling me with him as we tumbled onto the soft mattress.
I landed squarely against his chest.
For a long, breathless moment, neither of us moved.
The room was silent except for the heavy thudding of his heart beneath my ear. His arm remained locked around my waist, holding me flush against the heat of his torso. I looked up, finding his face inches from mine.
There was no criminal boss in his eyes right now. There was only a man—hungry, intensely alive, looking at me as if I were water in the middle of a desert.
"Martha," he murmured, his fingers tightening against the fabric of my apron.
"You held your weight for fifty seconds," I whispered, my lips parting, my breath catching in my throat. The proximity was intoxicating. Every protective barrier I had built around my heart over the past three years was crumbling under the intensity of his stare.
"I wouldn't have stood for five without you," he said softly.
His hand slid up my back, his palm warm and steady against the nape of my neck, gently drawing me down.
A sharp, metallic knock on the outer suite door shattered the spell.
"Maxwell? It's Dr. Vance. I brought your pre-gala booster."
The air turned to ice.
We scrambled. I rolled off the bed, helping Maxwell swing his dead-weight legs back into the wheelchair, throwing the blanket over his lap just as the master key turned in the lock.
Vance entered without waiting. He had a loaded syringe already in his hand—not amber this time, but a milky white liquid.
Propofol mixed with something heavier.
Vance’s eyes darted from Maxwell to me. He noticed the heavy sweat glistening on Maxwell’s temples, the rumpled sheets, and the flushed heat on my cheeks.
The doctor’s eyes narrowed into slits of vicious realization.
May you like
"You're not doing physical therapy in here, are you, Martha?" Vance asked, his voice dripping with sudden, venomous suspicion. He reached into his pocket and clicked open a tactical folding knife. "Because if you are... both of you are leaving this house in body bags tonight."
***
