Before Chad even shifted my stolen Porsche into drive, Brooke’s mother, Evelyn, stepped toward the edge of the curb, wrapping my late mother’s Russian sable coat tighter around her shoulders. She reached into her crocodile-skin Hermès clutch, pulled out a crumpled, damp five-dollar bill, and let it flutter down into the greasy black puddle right between the front casters of my wheelchair.
"There you go, Ethan," Evelyn cooed, her voice dripping with toxic sweetness as her private Lincoln Town Car pulled up behind the Porsche. "Put that toward your physical therapy co-pay. And do tell your little immigrant waitress friend that if she’s looking for extra cash, my Boca Raton condo needs the grout scrubbed in the guest bathrooms—though after watching her tonight, I’d have to lock up the silverware first."
Isabella took a sharp step forward, her fists clenched at her sides, ready to tear into the woman, but I gently caught her wrist and shook my head.
"Have a safe drive home, Evelyn," I said softly, staring straight at the vintage diamond brooch pinned to the lapel of the fur coat—a piece my father had custom-made at Tiffany’s in 1994, which carried an embedded micro-serial number registered with Chubb Insurance’s high-value recovery unit.
Inside the Porsche, Chad smirked, cranked the steering wheel hard to the right so the massive rear Michelin tires aimed directly at the flooded gutter, and revved the engine to seven thousand RPM. He dumped the clutch. As the car screeched away down 58th Street, the spinning rear tires blasted a wall of freezing, oil-slicked street water straight into my chest and across Isabella’s legs.
"Those absolute monsters!" Isabella gasped, immediately dropping to her knees on the wet pavement without caring that her black trousers were soaking up the dirty puddle. She pulled a handful of clean paper napkins from her apron pocket and wiped the freezing street grime off my chin and neck, her dark eyes blazing with anger. "I don't care how many buildings that guy owns or whose name is on that car—nobody treats another human being like that and gets away with it. God sees everything they’re doing to you, Mr. Vance."
"Call me Ethan," I said, my voice dropping its shaky, weak inflection for just a fraction of a second as I looked at this girl who had just lost her job, her rent money, and two hundred and fifty dollars defending a stranger she thought was penniless. "Where do you pick up your brother Leo’s insulin?"
"The twenty-four-hour CVS up on Columbus Circle," she sighed, shivering as another gust of wind swept down the block. "I have about a hundred and ninety dollars in tips saved in my shoebox at home, and I’m going to ask my Aunt Elena at the diner on 31st Street in Astoria if she can advance me two hundred bucks from next week’s waitress shifts. Look, let me push you to the subway elevator or help you into a yellow cab. You’re going to catch pneumonia sitting out here."
"My physical therapist’s van is parked right around the corner on Ninth Avenue," I lied smoothly, reaching into the inner lining of my tuxedo jacket where I kept an emergency stash of four crisp hundred-dollar bills folded inside a hidden stitched seam the hotel POS machine couldn't decline. I pressed the four bills firmly into her cold palm and closed her fingers over them. "Take this. Go to CVS tonight and get Leo’s insulin pump supplies."
Isabella gasped, trying to push the bills back into my hand. "No, Ethan, I can't take your last cash! Your credit card just got declined inside!"
"Please, Isabella. If you don't take it, then Chad and Brooke won tonight," I told her, holding her gaze until she finally nodded, tears spilling over her eyelashes.
"I’m going to pay back every single cent," she promised fiercely, writing her cell phone number on the back of her torn timecard with a ballpoint pen and tucking it into my breast pocket before hurrying toward the Columbus Circle subway entrance.
I waited until her dark ponytail disappeared down the station stairs. Then I glanced up at the security camera above the service alley—a camera I knew was a non-working dummy dome because my own construction crew had renovated this hotel’s facade four years ago.
A matte-black, armored Cadillac Escalade with tinted government plates glided silently to the curb. I clicked my wheelchair brakes, placed both hands on the armrests, and stood straight up onto my own two feet in the pouring rain. Rolling my stiff shoulders back, I folded the titanium chair with one hand, tossed it into the Escalade’s trunk when my head of security popped the hatch, and climbed into the leather backseat—only to freeze when I saw Arthur Pendelton sitting across from me with twelve bloody stitches running across his forehead and a hospital IV band still strapped to his wrist.
