Chapter 263

Chapter 263:

She got back in the car. “Lenox Hill Hospital,” she told the GPS, her heart a leaden weight.

In his office at Koch Tower, Dallas read the text.

He stared at the words. He gripped the expensive fountain pen in his hand until the plastic cracked and ink bled across his fingers in a slow blue stain.

“Anson,” he muttered.

He knew. Even if Victoria was truly ill, Anson was weaponizing it — pulling Eliza back into the darkness just when she had finally stepped into the light.

“Weston!” He hit the intercom. “Get the car. Now p>

Eliza rushed into the hospital waiting room. The smell of antiseptic hit her immediately, triggering unwanted memories of her own stay. Anson was slumped in a plastic chair, his head in his hands. He looked up when he heard her heels on the tile.

“You came,” he whispered, his eyes filling with fresh tears.

𝘗𝘋𝘍𝘴 𝘰𝘯

“Where is she?” Eliza asked, breathless.

“Doctors are with her. It’s bad, El.” Anson stood. He reached for her hand.

Eliza hesitated — then let him take it. Just for a moment. Just for comfort.

She didn’t know that five miles away, a black SUV was tearing through traffic, carrying a husband who was done playing games.

The fluorescent lights of the Lenox Hill Hospital hallway hummed with a low, irritating buzz that seemed to vibrate against Dallas’s skull. He stood in the shadows at the far end of the corridor, body rigid, hand gripping his car keys so tightly the metal bit into his palm.

He watched them.

Eliza was sitting on a plastic bench outside the ICU. Her shoulders were slumped, her white suit wrinkled and conspicuously out of place in the sterile hallway. Anson Hyde sat beside her, leaning close, his hand covering hers on her knee.

Dallas felt his pupils contract. The air in his lungs turned to solid glass. The whiskey he’d consumed before leaving the club was warring with the lingering exhaustion from a recent, severe bout of pneumonia, making the scene at the end of the hall swim and distort at the edges. It wasn’t only jealousy — it was a physical rejection of the image before him. He had spent months pulling her out of this man’s orbit, and here she was, circling him again.

Eliza’s head snapped up. She must have felt the weight of his stare, heavy and burning. Her eyes found him in the shadows.

She moved as though she’d been burned. She snatched her hand from Anson’s grip and scrambled to her feet.

“Dallas?” Her voice was thin, cracking under the strain of the day.

Anson rose slowly. He adjusted his cuffs and smoothed the fabric of his shirt. He didn’t look guilty. He looked comfortable — like a man who belonged there, in the tragedy, beside her. A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched the corner of his mouth before he replaced it with an expression of somber concern.

Dallas walked forward. His dress shoes struck the linoleum with a hard, rhythmic clack. Click. Click. Click. Like a countdown.