Chapter 423
It was a miracle. It was a tragedy. It was the cruelest joke the universe had ever told.
“Eliza?” Jeannine asked sharply. “Are you there?”
“I—” Eliza pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.
If she told Jeannine, Jeannine would tell Dallas.
And what would Dallas do?
The Dallas she knew — the Dallas who was currently destroying himself to protect her — would see this child as a chain. A shackle binding her to a dying man. He would think he was ruining her life. He might demand she get rid of it. Or he might use it as another reason to hate himself, knowing he wouldn’t live to watch it be born.
Fear, primal and fierce, flooded her veins.
“I’m fine,” Eliza lied, her voice barely holding. “Just tired. I think I caught something in the rain.”
“You don’t sound fine,” Jeannine said, her tone shifting from mother-in-law to matriarch. “I’m sending a car. You’re going to see Dr. Evans at the private clinic. Now.”
“No, Jeannine, really—”
“It’s not a request, Eliza. If Dallas finds out you were sick and I did nothing, he will rise from his deathbed to strangle me. The car is five minutes away.”
The line went dead.
Eliza stared at the phone. Then she looked at the test on the counter.
She grabbed it and shoved it deep into her pocket.
She had to protect this secret. At least until she knew if Dallas wanted to live.
The private clinic was buried three stories underground — a fortress of steel and glass hidden beneath a nondescript office building in Midtown. It was where the city’s elite went when they wanted to bleed without making the news.
Dallas lay in a private suite, the hum of a dialysis machine filling the silence.
Two thick tubes ran from his arm, cycling his blood through the machine, scrubbing it of the toxins his failing kidneys could no longer process. He looked like a corpse hooked up to a battery. His skin was translucent, the blue veins stark against the pallor. His eyes were closed, sunken into dark hollows.
“How much longer?” he rasped, without opening his eyes.
“Two hours, Boss,” Simmons said from the corner. “You have to let the cycle finish. Your potassium levels were critical.”
Dallas clenched his free hand. Every minute he lay here was a minute he wasn’t securing Eliza’s future. He needed to be working. He needed to be dismantling Anson’s remaining shell companies.
“I can work from here,” Dallas said, trying to sit up.
“No.” Simmons stepped forward. “Dr. Vance said if you move, you risk blowing the vein. Lie down.”
Dallas fell back, cursing weakly.
His mind drifted. He saw Eliza’s face in the rain — the way she had looked at him in the stairwell. The hurt. The confusion.
I’m doing this for you, he thought. Hate me. Please, just hate me and go.
In the waiting room adjacent to his suite — separated by nothing more than a thin, soundproofed wall — Eliza sat on a plush velvet sofa.
.
.
.