Chapter 3 - The Discovery in the Archives
By 7:00 AM, the morning shift had arrived, but Daniel explicitly countermanded the nursing supervisor's schedule. Rachel was ordered to remain in Suite A. When Dr. Alan Harrison walked in for his morning rounds with a team of residents, he looked utterly astounded to find Leo sleeping peacefully in Rachel's arms, his vitals completely normal for the first time since birth.
"This... this is unprecedented," Harrison stammered, tapping his digital tablet. "His cortisol levels have dropped by eighty percent. Whatever you're doing, nurse Jenkins, keep doing it."
"I'm not doing anything medical, Doctor," Rachel replied flatly, her eyes fixed on the door where Mateo Cruz stood guard. "I'm just holding him."
Daniel stood by the window, watching the gray Chicago rain streak down the thick bulletproof glass. He turned around, buttoning his suit jacket. "I have to attend my wife's private memorial arrangements this morning, followed by a meeting with the board at the freight yards. I will return by noon. Mateo will remain outside this door with four armed men. Do not let anyone touch my son except you."
"I understand, Mr. Russo," Rachel said.
As soon as the heavy oak doors clicked shut behind Daniel and his security detail, Rachel carefully transferred Leo back into his sanitized incubator, watching as the baby stirred briefly before settling back into a quiet slumber. She turned to the charge nurse standing nervously by the entrance.
"Brenda, I need a twenty-minute break. My shift technically ended an hour ago."
"Go, go," Brenda whispered frantically, waving her hands. "Don't push your luck with those thugs outside."
Rachel didn't go to the locker room. Instead, she took the service elevator down to the basement level of St. Catherine Memorial Hospital, slipping through the labyrinthine corridors used for laundry carts and biohazard disposal. Her phone was dead—she had left her charger in her locker—but she needed to get to a landline or find out if Tommy was truly gone.
As she turned a corner near the hospital's administrative archives, she nearly collided with a man in a dark trench coat carrying a heavy leather briefcase. It was Mateo Cruz.
Rachel froze, pressing her back against the cool concrete wall behind a stack of spare supply crates. Mateo was talking quietly on an encrypted satellite phone.
"I don't care how you do it, find the girl's apartment," Mateo was saying into the phone. "The boss ordered the brother neutralized last night, but the cleanup crew found the apartment empty. Thomas Jenkins gave us a fake address for his next of kin. Find out where sister Rachel Jenkins lives, sweep the place, and make sure there are no loose ends connecting her to the gambling syndicate debts. If she realizes her brother was part of our money laundering front, it could compromise Suite A."
Rachel’s breath caught in her throat. She pressed her hand over her mouth to stop herself from gasping.
Money laundering front. Tommy hadn't just lost money to a simple underground poker game. The Russo organization had been using small-time gamblers like her brother to funnel illegal cash through shell corporations, and when they couldn't pay, they were executed to protect the billionaire's empire.
Mateo clicked his phone shut, checked his watch, and walked briskly down the hall toward the exit.
May you like
Rachel waited until his footsteps faded into the distance before sliding down the wall, her legs trembling violently. Her apartment was going to be searched. Her brother was either dead or running for his life. And she was trapped upstairs in a gilded cage, nursing the spawn of the man who had ordered the hit.
A cold, hard fury replaced the terror in her chest. She stood up, wiping a stray tear from her cheek. Daniel Russo thought he owned the city. He thought he could buy life, sell death, and crush anyone who got in his way. But he had made one fatal mistake: he had brought his dying son into her hospital, placed him in her arms, and given her unlimited access to his world.
