Chapter 8 - The Midnight Ward at Lakeview
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 SUVs, accompanied by six Chicago police cruisers and Noah’s rescued medical van riding safely in the center of our formation.
Sitting in the back of Matteo’s armored SUV with a dry wool blanket wrapped around my shoulders over my torn crimson gown, I stared at the fraudulent transfer deed from the cartel briefcase as fury burned through every vein in my body.
Five years ago, before Chase ever won his first national trophy, I had used the four hundred thousand dollars left to me by my late mother along with three years of my own architectural and engineering consulting fees to purchase 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 children and young adults would have a safe place to live.
Two years ago, while I was exhausted and sleeping in the hospital chair beside Chase’s ICU bed after his Indianapolis crash, Chase’s corporate lawyer had brought me a stack of medical insurance forms to sign—and buried in the middle of that stack had been a corporate umbrella addendum quietly placing the title of my clinic under Whitaker Holdings as a "tax shield"!
"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, my voice shaking with cold hatred as I showed Matteo the notarized timestamp from 2024.
"He used your devotion as a weapon against you from the very beginning, Vivian, and tonight I am going to make sure he never touches another brick that carries your name," Matteo said darkly as he handed me his satellite phone connected directly to the Illinois State 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 scene on 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 burly private guards in black windbreakers were blocking the weeping nurses from re-entering the building, and thirty seconds before we arrived, a hired 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, terrifying chorus of twenty-four battery-backup ventilator alarms began wailing simultaneously through the rain!
"The internal battery packs on those pediatric and spinal ventilators only hold twenty minutes of charge once the main grid and the diesel backup generator are manually locked out," I shouted as I threw open the SUV door before the tires even stopped rolling.
Matteo and twelve armed DeSantis security operatives hit the wet lawn like a tidal wave ahead of the police cruisers.
When the four cartel guards at the clinic doors reached beneath their windbreakers for suppressed pistols, Matteo and Luca disarmed and dropped the lead two enforcers onto the concrete steps in less than four seconds, while the remaining two guards threw their hands into the air at the sight of six police shotguns leveled at their chests!
Ignoring the commotion at the front entrance, I sprinted around the east hedge toward the brick generator house with the titanium crowbar from the SUV trunk in my hand and Matteo running right at my side.
Standing inside the generator doorway in a designer raincoat—watching a cartel technician pour sugar and chemical solvent into the diesel fuel tank of the emergency hospital generator while holding a digital camera to film the building being condemned—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 victim mask vanishing completely into 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 hurled him unconscious into the mud outside.
Cornered against the generator switchboard, Brielle reached into her raincoat 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 beside the sugar bags!
"That is for wearing my robe, and this is for touching my brother’s hospital," I said coldly as I planted my bare foot squarely on her designer coat to keep her pinned to the floor while Matteo bypassed the ruined diesel tank by throwing the secondary municipal cross-tie switch on the high-voltage transformer box!
With a deep electric hum, the main floodlights and all three floors of the Lakeview Clinic blazed back to full power, silencing the ventilator alarms upstairs as the nurses cheered from the windows!
As two Evanston police officers rushed into the shed and snapped steel handcuffs around a cursing, spitting Brielle Sutton, a black encrypted satellite smartphone slipped out of the inner lining of Brielle’s raincoat and skidded across the floor against Matteo’s boot.
I bent down and picked up the unlocked phone, expecting to see text messages between Brielle and Chase.
May you like
Instead, the open screen displayed an offshore private banking portal in Zurich showing that Brielle Sutton’s real name was Brielle Kovacs—Viktor Kovacs’s biological niece—and that she had been placed inside Whitaker Motorsports six months ago specifically to seduce Chase and blackmail him into handing over his logistics routes!
Then my eyes dropped to the bottom of her banking screen, where the original five-hundred-thousand-dollar retainer wire that had hired Brielle to infiltrate my marriage six months ago was listed by sender account—and the breath froze solid in my chest as I saw that the wire had been authorized from an executive treasury account inside DeSantis Logistics headquarters!
