Chapter 3 - The Scar on His Jaw
Twelve years vanished in a heartbeat.
Emma stared at the thin, pale line tracing the contour of Julian’s strong jaw. Her vision blurred, transported back to a freezing night in 2014 when she was barely nineteen, a first-year nursing student walking back to her dorm near 4th Street. She had heard coughing behind a dumpster, found a teenager drenched in blood, his skin blue from hypothermia, clutching a torn leather jacket.
She hadn't run away. She had knelt in the filthy snow for forty-five minutes, packing his wound with her wool scarf, pressing down with all her weight, crying as she begged him to keep his eyes open.
“What’s your name?” she had asked through chattering teeth.
“J-Jules,” he had choked out.
“Don't you dare close your eyes, Jules. Look at my face. I'm Emma. You’re going to live, you hear me? Just take me home... that's all you have to do when this is over. Just take me home.”
The ambulance had arrived, sirens deafening, and two rough men in leather jackets had shoved her aside, loading him into an unmarked van before the paramedics could intervene. She had never seen him again. She had spent months wondering if the boy with the silver-gray eyes had survived the night.
“Jules?” Emma whispered, her voice cracking in the quiet hallway.
Julian didn't flinch. He simply stood there, letting her look at him, letting her see the scarred survivor beneath the thousand-dollar suit and the underworld crown.
“I woke up in an offshore clinic three days later,” Julian said, his voice stripped of all corporate armor. “They told me a college girl kept me from bleeding out on the asphalt. By the time I could walk again, you had moved out of your dorms. I searched Bellmont for five years, Emma. But when Silas Drake started the gang war on the North Side, my father sent me to Europe to build our shipping syndicates. I couldn't come back until I had enough power to burn this city down before anyone could hurt you.”
“You... you remembered me all this time?”
“I remembered your voice,” Julian said simply. “Every night I closed my eyes in a hospital bed across the ocean, I heard you telling me to look at your face. So when you climbed into my sedan yesterday morning outside this hospital, half-asleep, smelling of antiseptic and lavender, and told me to just take you home... I knew God had finally paid his debt to me.”
Emma covered her mouth with trembling fingers. The coincidence wasn't random at all. He had been outside St. Catherine’s because he had finally tracked down where Emma Hayes, RN, worked.
“Boss,” Marco interrupted from the glass doors, his tone low and urgent. He held his phone out. “Silas Drake just moved thirty men toward the river warehouse. He knows you blew off the sit-down yesterday. He thinks you’re vulnerable.”
Julian didn't turn around. His gaze stayed fixed on Emma, tender and fiercely protective. “Let him move. He will find nothing but empty steel and federal agents waiting on the docks.”
“Julian,” Emma said, grabbing the lapel of his overcoat instinctively. “You can't get involved in violence. The police—this hospital—your life—”
Julian gently covered her small, cold hand with his large palm, squeezing her fingers. “Twelve years ago, you protected me when I was nothing. Nobody hurts you in this city, Emma. Not Silas Drake. And certainly not Nathan Vale.”
Before she could answer, the emergency trauma doors burst open with a loud alarm. Paramedics charged in wheeling a gurney drenched in blood.
“Multiple GSW! Twenty-two-year-old male, losing pulse!” a paramedic shouted.
Emma’s professional instincts took over instantly. She pulled her hand back, tied her blond hair into a tight knot, and snapped on blue nitrile gloves. “Trauma Bay 1! Get two units of O-negative right now!”
May you like
Julian stepped back toward the lobby shadows, watching her move with the grace, speed, and precision of a guardian angel in scrubs. He nodded once to Marco.
“Find everything Arthur Vale has ever hidden in the hospital’s offshore foundations,” Julian ordered quietly. “By sunrise, I want his dynasty reduced to ashes.”
