Chapter 2: The House Manager Waits Beyond the Heavy Double Doors
I secured the fresh gauze over Liam’s abdomen and pressed the tape down along the edges, careful not to pull his skin. The dressing looked clean for the moment. That was all I could promise. Beneath it, the wound still felt like a clock running in the dark.
Liam watched my hands instead of my face. His right leg lay trapped in the metal frame of the external fixator, rods and pins holding the bones in a rigid arrangement that made the massive bed seem less like furniture than equipment. The oxygen concentrator breathed steadily beside him. On the table, the morphine syringe waited in its sealed tray.
I stripped off my gloves, folded them inside the used materials, and carried the bundle toward the doors. Liam did not stop me. His silence was not permission. It felt more like a warning that he expected me to return.
The heavy double doors opened with a low scrape.
Leo stood in the corridor.
He had not gone far. In his dark suit, he looked almost part of the manor’s architecture: straight-backed, composed, and difficult to read beneath the cold light spilling from the tall windows. He glanced at the waste bundle in my hand, then at the room behind me. He did not ask what I had found. He did not need to.
I carried the waste to a covered container set against the marble wall and placed it inside. The sweet, foul odor clung to my gloves even after they were gone. When I turned back, Leo was still waiting.
The corridor stretched in both directions, wider than the apartment where Tommy and I had lived. Marble ran beneath my scuffed sneakers without a mark. Vaulted ceilings disappeared into shadow. The windows were tall enough to make a person feel watched by the sky, though beyond them there were only evergreens, ironwork, and a gray distance that made the estate seem cut off from the city.
I had accepted the position in a room that smelled like antiseptic and old fear. Ten thousand dollars a week had sounded unreal when I heard it. Now the number sat inside my mind with the weight of the thick envelope Leo had placed in my hands earlier, along with the nondisclosure agreement. The money could buy time for Tommy. It could also buy this house the right to keep me here longer than I wanted.
Leo made a small gesture toward the corridor.
I followed him only a few steps, stopping where the patient room remained visible behind us. Leaving the estate would have been simple in theory. I could have taken my duffel, walked through the marble foyer, and waited for the town car to carry me back toward the roads and the city. I could have told myself that a hostile patient had made his choice.
But Liam had not chosen the infection under the dressing. He had chosen resistance. Those were not the same thing.
I looked down at my hands. The skin around my nails was dry from hospital soap. There was a faint red mark where Liam’s grip had closed around my wrist.
The mark would fade. Tommy’s need would not.
I turned away from the corridor and walked back through the double doors.
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Liam’s pale eyes found me immediately. Nothing in his expression softened. The oxygen concentrator continued its patient mechanical breathing, and the covered wound remained between us like a problem neither of us could move around.
I returned to the bedside, leaving the door open behind me. For now, I was staying. I still had no assurance he would cooperate, and the dressing could not be trusted to hold until morning.
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