Chapter 414

Vance vaulted over the table. He pressed his fingers to Dallas’s neck. “Vinnie, what did you give him?”

“Just a downer — to help him sleep!” Vinnie said, his voice fraying with fear.

“He’s in cardiac arrest!” Vance shouted. “Call 911! Someone find the AED — this place has to have one!”

Dallas lay on the floor, gasping for air. Vinnie stared down at him, his face draining of color. “I killed him?”

Dallas heard him. Through the roar of blood in his ears, he heard the regret.

“Get away,” Dallas choked out.

Then the doors burst open.

Eliza ran in.

She saw the crowd. She saw Dallas on the floor.

“Dallas!” she screamed.

She threw herself down beside him. “Dallas, what happened?”

He looked at her. His eyes were wide — not with fear of death, but with the terror of being seen like this. Weak. Broken. Dying on a barroom floor.

“Don’t,” he whispered. He tried to push her away, but his hand only flopped against her arm. “Don’t look.”

“Vance, what is it?” she yelled at the doctor.

Vance was doing chest compressions, sweat dripping down his face. “His heart is stopping! We need a defibrillator!”

“Why?” she cried. “He was fine a minute ago!”

“He hasn’t been fine for months!” Vance shouted. “He’s sick, Eliza — critically sick!”

The world stopped.

Paramedics rushed in. They ripped open Dallas’s shirt.

And Eliza saw it.

Beneath the fine fabric, his chest wasn’t smooth and perfect. It was a roadmap of suffering. A long, faded scar ran down his sternum. And there, confirming the terrifying hardness she had felt beneath his shirt at the clinic days ago, was the truth — exposed in brutal, unforgiving light.

On his left side, a mechanical drive-line exited his skin through a surgically reinforced port, the tube snaking down to a heavy battery pack clipped to his belt.

The LVAD.

She hadn’t imagined it. The humming she had heard when she lay against his chest wasn’t a strong heartbeat. It was a machine keeping him alive. She had touched his chest and he had flinched. The bloody tissues. The antiseptic smell. The impotence. The comment about being healthy. Her mind connected the horrifying dots. He didn’t just have a bad heart. He had no heart function left. He was running on batteries and willpower.

He was dying.

“Clear!”

Thump.

Dallas’s body arched off the floor.

He didn’t wake up.

They loaded him onto the stretcher. Eliza ran after them.

“I’m coming with him!” she yelled.

Simmons blocked her path, his face grim.

“No, Eliza,” he said, his voice stripped of its usual deference. “Mr. Koch gave strict orders. If this happened — you are not to see him.”

“He’s my husband!” she screamed.

“Legally, perhaps,” Simmons said, his tone like ice. “But his final wish was that you remember him as he was. Not like this.” He climbed into the ambulance. The doors slammed shut.

Eliza stood in the rain, watching the lights fade into the distance. Vance stood beside her, holding the empty amber vial.

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