Chapter 5 - Midnight Iron
For the next four nights, the master bedroom of the Mercer estate became a torture chamber of rehabilitation.
The routine was brutal. Every night at 12:15 AM, after the perimeter guard made his rounds past the iron terrace, Grace would bolt the door. She would strip the heavy wool blankets from Caleb’s legs and begin the agonizing work of manual stimulation.
She used hot towels soaked in peppermint oil and wintergreen to draw blood into the stagnant capillaries. She worked her thumbs deep into the fibrous meat of his calves, breaking up the lactic acid and adhesions that had formed during three weeks of immobility.
Caleb did not make a sound. He bit down on a rolled leather belt, his veins bulging against his neck, sweat soaking through his linen undershirts until he was drenched.
“Again,” he would hiss through his teeth, his eyes bloodshot with agony. “Bend the knee.”
Grace would hook her arms under his right knee, lifting the dead weight of his leg, forcing the joint through its range of motion. “Push back against my hand, Caleb. Push!”
He concentrated every shred of his will into his lower spine. He visualized the severed connections, the broken electrical circuits in his back, imagining them knitting together like hot iron under a blacksmith’s hammer.
On the third night, his heel pushed against Grace’s palm with enough force to slide her six inches backward across the polished hardwood floor.
She fell onto her hips, gasping for air, her hair tumbling out of its neat pins. She looked at him from the floor, her chest heaving, a fierce, triumphant laugh escaping her throat.
“You almost knocked me over, you bastard,” she breathed.
Caleb lay back against the pillows, his chest rising and falling violently. A slow, savage grin spread across his face—the first real smile he had worn since the bullets hit him on LaSalle Street.
“You’re getting weak, Holloway.”
“I’m carrying two hundred and twenty pounds of stubborn criminal every night,” she retorted, standing up and brushing off her skirts. “My deadlifts are improving.”
She walked to the edge of the bed and extended both hands.
Caleb looked at them. “What are you doing?”
“Time to stand.”
“Grace—”
“You have thirty-six hours before Owen brings Marcus Kane with the final transfer papers,” she said, her voice dropping into deadly seriousness. “You aren't going to terrify them from a wheelchair. If you want them to break, they have to see the dead man walk.”
Caleb set his jaw. He reached out and gripped her forearms. Her skin was warm, her tendons taut as wire beneath his heavy fingers.
“On three,” she said.
“One. Two. Three.”
With a guttural roar swallowed behind his teeth, Caleb hauled himself forward. His core engaged, his massive back muscles taking the brunt of the load, and then his feet hit the cold floorboards.
Pain, blinding and white-hot, shot up his spine like liquid copper. His knees buckled immediately, threatening to drop him like a slaughtered ox.
Grace did not let go. She stepped forward, bracing her hip against his thigh, burying her shoulder beneath his armpit, her small frame straining under his immense weight. She grunted with the effort, her shoes skidding an inch across the rug, but she held him.
“Stand up, Caleb!” she hissed directly into his ear. “Lock your knees! Stand up!”
He pushed. He drove his heels into the wood, his quadriceps screaming in protest, the dormant nerves firing in chaotic bursts of fire and ice.
And then, his knees locked.
Caleb Mercer stood.
He was six feet two inches of scarred, terrifying presence, towering over the woman holding him up. The room spun for a few seconds; his balance was precarious, like a man walking on stilts through a gale, but he was upright. His feet were planted on his own floorboards.
He looked down at Grace. Her face was inches from his chest, her breath coming in ragged, warm gasps against his throat. Her hands were locked around his ribs, holding him steady, her eyes shining with an awe that made his heart pound harder than the physical exertion.
“Look at you,” she whispered.
Caleb did not look at his legs. He looked at her mouth, at the faint dusting of freckles across her nose, at the fierce loyalty burning in a woman who owed him nothing.
Without thinking, his hand moved from her shoulder to the side of her neck, his thumb resting gently against the soft skin beneath her jawline.
“You brought me back from the grave, Grace,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly hum.
May you like
Her breath hitched. She didn't pull away. For a heartbeat suspended in the dark, the crime boss and the maid were simply two people clinging to each other in the wreckage of a war.
Then, from the hallway outside, came the sound of a heavy boot scraping against the limestone floor.
