ADRIAN POV
The rain hammered down like bullets.
Adrian Sinclair sat in his car outside St. Catherine's Hospital and couldn't move. His hands shook on the steering wheel. Seven years. Seven years since he'd been home and now his mother was dying.
She'd called him two days ago. Her voice was different. Smaller. She'd said the word cancer like it was something shameful, something that had to be whispered. She'd asked him to come home. She'd said she loved him.
Adrian hadn't heard those words in so long he almost didn't recognize them.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The man staring back was a stranger. Dark stubble covered his jaw. His eyes were the color of concrete and just as dead. A scar ran down his left side from a knife fight three years ago in Moscow. His clothes were black and expensive because money was the only language he'd learned in the criminal underworld.
He looked like a ghost. Like death wearing a suit.
Adrian forced himself out of the car. The rain soaked through his jacket and he didn't care. He'd survived worse than getting wet. He'd survived seven years of violence and darkness and the kind of money that came with blood attached. He'd survived cutting himself off from every person who loved him because that was safer for them.
He wasn't sure he could survive walking into his mother's hospital room.
The hospital smelled like disinfectant and sickness and something underneath that made his stomach turn. Adrian followed the signs on the wall like a man in a dream. Room 412. His mother's name was on the board outside. Margaret Sinclair. Cancer. The word felt like a knife.
He pushed open the door.
His mother looked small. Impossibly small. The machines beside her bed beeped in rhythm like a countdown to something he didn't want to count toward. Her skin was pale and her hair had thinned. She was sleeping, her hands folded on top of the white sheets like she was already preparing to disappear.
Adrian couldn't breathe.
He sat down in the chair beside her bed and reached out. Her hand was fragile. He was terrified he would break her if he held too tight. He slipped his fingers into her palm anyway and that's when the terror hit him. Real terror. Not the kind he felt in dark alleys or when guns were pointed at his head. This was different. This was the terror of losing the only person who'd ever loved him unconditionally.
Margaret's eyes opened.
For a moment she just stared at him like she wasn't sure he was real. Then her entire face transformed. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her hand squeezed his with surprising strength.
"You came," she whispered.
Adrian couldn't speak. He just held her hand and tried not to shatter into pieces.
"I knew you would come," Margaret continued. Her voice was thin but sure. "I always knew. Even when your father said you were dead to this family. Even when Marcus stopped mentioning you. I knew my boy was still alive somewhere. I knew you'd come home."
Adrian's jaw clenched. He wanted to tell her that he wasn't worth coming home for. He wanted to tell her about the things he'd done in the darkness. The people he'd hurt. The money he'd stolen. The blood on his hands.
Instead he said, "I'm not leaving again."
It was a lie but she needed to hear it.
Margaret cried harder and it broke something in his chest. He should have been here. While she was getting sick he was running guns through Eastern Europe. While her hair was falling out he was stealing money from people who would kill him if they knew his real name. While his mother was dying he was so far away from anything good that he wasn't sure redemption was even possible.
"You need to rest," Adrian said. He was still holding her hand.
Margaret shook her head. "I need to look at you. My beautiful boy. You're so thin. So tired. What have they done to you out there in that world?"
Adrian didn't know how to answer that. The world had carved him into something sharp and empty. The criminal underworld had taught him that love was weakness and loyalty was currency and staying alive meant feeling nothing at all.
"I'm fine," he said.
Margaret saw through the lie immediately. She always had. That was the problem with mothers. They knew you better than you knew yourself.
"Stay with me," she said. "Just stay in this room for a while. Stay long enough to remember what home feels like."
Adrian nodded. He would stay. He would sit in this hospital room and hold his dying mother's hand and try to become human again even though he wasn't sure that was possible anymore. He would pretend that seven years of blood and darkness and violence hadn't changed him into something unrecognizable.
Margaret drifted back to sleep. Adrian sat in the darkness and thought about his father.
Thomas Sinclair wouldn't forgive him. Adrian knew this with absolute certainty. His father had made that clear seven years ago when Adrian had walked away from the family business. Thomas had called him a coward. A failure. An embarrassment. When Adrian refused to come back, Thomas had disowned him publicly. The newspapers had run the story. The Sinclair family's wayward son was no longer a son at all.
Adrian was a ghost. Had been a ghost for so long that he wasn't sure he could come back to life.
The machines beside Margaret's bed beeped steadily. Adrian watched his mother sleep and realized something that terrified him more than any gun or knife or dark alley ever could.
He needed to become human again. Not for himself. For her. For the woman lying in this hospital bed who still believed he was worth saving.
Adrian sat there for hours. His mother slept and the machines beeped and the rain hammered against the windows. He held her hand and made promises to a woman who might not live to see them kept.
Around midnight, someone knocked on the door.
Adrian tensed immediately. Old instincts kicked in. Hand reaching for the knife that wasn't at his hip anymore. Eyes scanning the shadows in the room for threats.
The door opened slowly.
A nurse stepped inside. Young. Beautiful in a way that made people pause when they looked at her. She had black hair down her back and dark brown eyes that seemed to carry something broken inside them. She wore hospital scrubs and moved through the room with careful, precise steps like she was trying not to take up too much space.
She didn't see Adrian at first. She was focused on the machines. On Margaret. Professional and competent.
Then she looked up and made eye contact with him and her entire body went rigid.
Adrian watched the color drain from her face. Watched her eyes widen. Watched something cross her expression that looked like terror mixed with recognition.
She knew who he was.
And based on the way she was looking at him like he was a ghost made flesh, she wasn't happy about it.
The nurse's hands shook as she checked Margaret's vitals. She was trying to pretend Adrian didn't exist but her hands were shaking and her breathing had changed and Adrian could read people the way other men read books.
Something had just shifted in the universe.
Something dangerous.
The nurse finished her work and turned to leave without saying a single word to him. Adrian watched her go and felt something wake up inside his chest for the first time since he'd come home.
He needed to know her name.
He needed to know why she'd looked at him like she knew exactly who he was and hated him for it.
Adrian stood up and followed her into the hallway.