Chapter 4 - The Hospital Room
By midnight, Marcus Vance had delivered on his promise. Sarah Jennings had been quietly evacuated from the county hospital in Gary via a private medical transport and admitted to the restricted VIP wing of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago.
I arrived at the hospital alone, leaving Silas and a team of eight former special operations contractors to guard the Lake Forest estate. I wore a plain black sweater and jeans, looking less like the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar fund and more like a ghost walking through the sterile white corridors.
When I pushed open the door to room 812, the sound of the heart monitor was the only noise in the darkened room. The pale light of the city filtered through the large windows, casting long shadows across the bed.
Sarah looked so fragile. The vibrant, laughing woman who used to paint canvases in my small apartment during our college days had been replaced by a shadow, her skin translucent, her dark hair cropped short from treatments. But when the door clicked, her head turned slowly, and those familiar, brilliant blue eyes locked onto mine.
"Ethan," she whispered, her voice like paper rustling in the wind.
I walked to the bedside, my knees suddenly giving way as I sank into the vinyl chair beside her. I took her hand—it was cold, the skin rough from years of manual labor I had never known about.
"I'm here, Sarah," I choked out, the tears I had suppressed for four years finally spilling over my cheeks. "The boys are safe. They're at the house in Lake Forest. They're perfectly safe."
A tear slipped from the corner of her eye, tracking down her hollow cheek. "I'm so sorry, Ethan. I wanted to tell you. Every day for four years, I wanted to pick up the phone. But your father... he sent men to the apartment in the middle of the night. They showed me pictures of you leaving the office, pictures of your car. They said if I didn't disappear, you would have an accident on the highway. I couldn't risk your life."
"He lied to us, Sarah," I said, kissing the back of her cold hand, my jaw tightening until it ached. "He made me believe you took a payout. He made me hate you."
"I never wanted his money," she said softly, her fingers twitching against mine. "I just wanted our babies to live. Leo looks so much like you when he's angry. He holds his mouth the exact same way. And Noah... Noah has your quiet heart."
"They're beautiful, Sarah," I told her, leaning my forehead against the edge of the mattress. "The doctors here... I've hired the best oncologists in the country. We’re going to fix this. We're going to be a family."
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Sarah reached out with her other hand, her fingers gently tangling in my hair, the gesture so familiar it broke my heart into a thousand pieces. "My sweet, stubborn Ethan. You can't fight your father with money. He has the political machine behind him. He has the board."
"I don't care about the board," I said, looking up into her eyes with a cold, absolute resolve. "I am going to burn his empire to the ground. For you. For the boys."
