Six nurses had quit in five weeks, and the last one fled the mansion sobbing so hard she left her coat behind. Everyone expected me to run too, but I needed the money badly enough to face Chicago’s most feared crime boss, and before my first week ended, I was about to break the one rule every nurse had been warned never to break.

The black town car smelled like leather and stale cigarettes as it carried me beyond Chicago into miles of dark evergreens. I kept my hands folded over my worn scrubs, trying not to think about the final notice sitting on my kitchen counter or my younger brother, Tommy, lying ninety pounds thin in a hospital bed.

His leukemia had stopped responding to standard treatment. The experimental trial that might save him cost more money than I could earn in three lifetimes.

Then an anonymous caller offered me $10,000 a week in cash.

The rules were simple: live on the estate, carry no phone, ask no questions about my patient’s injuries, and ignore the armed men guarding the property. Every instinct told me something was wrong, but desperation has a way of making danger look survivable.

So I said yes.

A broad-shouldered man named Leo met me outside the stone mansion and escorted me upstairs. “Your predecessor lasted two days,” he said. “The nurse before her lasted a shift and a half.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Leo stopped outside two heavy wooden doors. “Liam Mercer hates being helpless. He’ll insult you, refuse medication, throw things. Do your job, don’t try to fix him, and don’t talk back.”

Then his voice dropped. “And never touch the blinds.”

“Why?”

“He wants the room dark.”

I tightened my grip on my cheap duffel bag. “As long as Friday still means ten thousand dollars, he can growl all he wants.”

Leo opened the doors.

The smell hit me first. Iodine, sweat, blood, and the unmistakable sourness of infected flesh filled the dark bedroom.

“Tell her to leave,” a rough voice growled.

Leo gave me one final look and shut the door behind him. I switched on a bedside lamp, and a drinking glass immediately exploded against the wall inches from my head.

“Turn that light off.”

Liam Mercer lay in an enormous bed, bruised and ghostly pale. His right leg was trapped inside an external fixator with metal pins drilled into bone, while thick abdominal bandages were already bleeding through.

“No.”

His icy blue eyes narrowed. “Get out.”

Instead, I washed my hands and pulled on gloves. “From the smell alone, you’re developing an infection. Unless dying dramatically is part of your schedule, I’m changing that dressing.”

When I peeled away the gauze, my stomach tightened. The skin beneath it was angry red, swollen, and beginning to rot.

His hand suddenly locked around my wrist.

“Don’t touch me.”

“You’re cutting off my circulation.”

“I said don’t.”

I forced myself to hold his stare even though my pulse was hammering. “If I leave that tissue untreated, bacteria gets into your bloodstream and you die.”

Then I leaned closer.

“And I need you alive until Friday.”

Something changed in his expression. Slowly, his fingers loosened.

I cleaned the wound, started antibiotics, inspected every pin in his shattered leg, then settled into a chair with a paperback. When he ordered me to turn off the light, I calmly answered, “When I finish the chapter.”

For the first time in five weeks, nobody ran from Liam Mercer’s room.

By day four, he had stopped throwing things at me. Instead, he punished me with silence.

“Pain from one to ten?” I asked, holding his morphine.

Nothing.

“Fine,” I said. “You’s can be stubborn in pain.”

His jaw tightened, but he still refused to answer. Later that afternoon, however, I noticed something that made me forget his temper entirely.

Whenever sunlight slipped through the tiny gap between the curtains, Liam turned his face toward it.

Not away.

Toward it.

I stared at the sealed blinds, remembering Leo’s warning. Six nurses had been terrified enough to flee this house, yet something about Liam’s expression told me the darkness wasn’t what he truly wanted.

My fingers closed around the blind cord.

“Don’t,” Liam said quietly.

It was the first word he had spoken to me in hours. There was no anger in his voice this time.

There was fear.