Chapter 8 - Blackout at the Evanston Clinic
Within three minutes of reading the clinic liquidation order, we were racing north along Lake Shore Drive toward Evanston in a convoy of four black DeSantis security vehicles, accompanied by six police cruisers and Noah’s rescued medical van riding safely in the center of our formation.
Sitting in the back of Matteo’s armored sedan with a dry wool coat wrapped over my torn crimson gown, I stared at the fraudulent transfer deed from the cartel briefcase as cold fury burned through my veins.
Five years ago, before Chase ever won his first trophy, I had used the four hundred thousand dollars left to me by my late mother along with three years of my own engineering fees to buy the historic brick building in Evanston and convert it into the Lakeview Specialty Respiratory Clinic so my brother Noah and twenty-three other ventilator-dependent young people would have a safe home.
Two years ago, while I was exhausted and sleeping beside Chase’s ICU bed after his Indianapolis crash, Chase’s lawyer had brought me a stack of hospital insurance forms to sign—and buried in the middle of that stack had been a corporate umbrella page quietly placing my clinic under Whitaker Holdings.
"He slipped that transfer page under my hand while he was lying in a neck brace pretending he couldn’t remember his own mother’s birthday," I said quietly as I showed Matteo the notarized date from 2024.
"He used your loyalty as a weapon against you from the start, Vivian, and tonight I am going to make sure he never touches another brick that carries your name," Matteo replied darkly while handing me his satellite phone connected directly to the Illinois Attorney General’s home line.
When our convoy roared through the wrought-iron gates of the Lakeview Clinic in Evanston at ten-fifteen at night, the rain-swept lawn looked like a war zone.
Two unmarked white cargo trucks belonging to Viktor Kovacs’s liquidation company were backed up to the main glass entrance doors, four private guards in black windbreakers were blocking the weeping nurses from re-entering the building, and thirty seconds before we arrived, a contractor at the side utility shed had thrown the main circuit breaker—plunging the entire three-story brick clinic into pitch darkness.
Inside the darkened intensive care wing on the second floor, the high-pitched chorus of twenty-four battery-backup ventilator alarms began wailing simultaneously through the storm.
"Those internal ventilator batteries only hold twenty minutes of charge once the main grid and the diesel backup generator are locked out," I shouted as I threw open the car door before the tires stopped rolling.
Matteo and twelve armed DeSantis security operatives hit the wet lawn ahead of the police cruisers, disarming and dropping the four cartel guards at the front entrance onto the concrete steps in less than five seconds.
Ignoring the commotion at the front doors, I sprinted around the east boxwood hedge toward the brick generator shed with a titanium pry bar in my hand and Matteo running right at my side.
Standing inside the open generator doorway in a designer raincoat—watching a cartel technician pour chemical solvent into the fuel tank of the emergency hospital generator while filming the blackout on her phone—was Brielle Sutton.
"What are you doing here, you told me at McCormick Place that you were terrified of Kovacs," I snarled as I lunged through the doorway.
Brielle spun around, her fake tears from the gala completely gone and replaced by a cold, venomous sneer as her hired technician swung a heavy pipe wrench toward Matteo’s head.
Matteo caught the technician’s forearm in midair, twisted the man’s wrist until the bone snapped with a loud crack, and threw him unconscious onto the wet grass outside.
Cornered against the generator switchboard, Brielle reached into her pocket for a compact stun gun, only for me to step straight inside her reach and deliver a single, blistering open-palm slap across her jaw that knocked her flat onto the concrete floor.
"That is for wearing my robe, and this is for touching my brother’s hospital," I said coldly as I planted my foot on the hem of her coat while Matteo bypassed the ruined diesel tank by throwing the secondary municipal cross-tie switch on the high-voltage transformer wall.
With a deep electric hum, all three floors of the Lakeview Clinic blazed back to full power, silencing the ventilator alarms upstairs as the nurses cheered from the windows.
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As two Evanston police officers rushed into the shed to snap steel handcuffs around a cursing Brielle Sutton, an unlocked black satellite smartphone slipped out of her raincoat lining and skidded across the concrete against Matteo’s boot.
I bent down to pick up the phone, and my breath froze solid in my throat as I saw an open Zurich banking portal on the screen proving that Brielle’s real name was Brielle Kovacs—Viktor Kovacs’s biological niece—and that the original five-hundred-thousand-dollar wire that had hired her six months ago to seduce my husband had been sent from an executive treasury account inside DeSantis Logistics headquarters.
