Page 81 of Chandelier Sin
I gave a nod and headed toward the door, stopping to look back at him, trying to decipher if his genius could predict how this might end.
He rounded his desk and sat down in the swivel chair, arching his hands thoughtfully as though he were about to reflect on our meeting.
Or perhaps the next patient.
His notes were in his mind. That wasn’t a scary revelation at all.
I’d heard this about him, that he’d replay a conversation word for word and then discern a deeper meaning. An answer that the client’s mind had refused to share, until Cole had probed it with the infinite scalpel of his own consciousness.
“Sinclair, give me something,” he whispered.
“He’s dangerous,” I said. “Ruthless.”
His expression became haunted, as though he had just realized how far we would have to go.
“Have I lost my senses taking this on?” I asked.
“If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “we’re all on the arc of madness.”
I smirked at his humor. “That helps.”
“The obstacle is the way,” he said, offering advice from the stoics.
There was no persuading him otherwise.
Thoughts of Eve crowded my mind like an uninvited guest. Would I be saving her, too? Or would she destroy everything we were attempting to do?
I threw Cole a wave goodbye, considering his words as I strolled through the foyer, no less reassured.
We both knew I wasn’t getting out of this unscathed, but the price for walking away was too high.
Those women deserved a hero storming the castle to get every single one of them out. All I had to do was come up with a plan that resulted in minimal casualties.
And remember that the most hazardous VIP at Pendulum was Eve.
The midday sun shone through the window of the east hallway, the view a reminder we were seven floors up.
Outside Cedars, the world continued regardless of the life changing events unfolding here, where patients frantically fought for life.
We did what we could.
And sometimes we failed.
Take hospital administrator Trent Ginsburg, for example, the asshole walking toward me. The man who made the big decisions—sometimes the wrong ones.
When he caught sight of me, he spun around to go in the opposite direction.
Yeah, better turn around, fucker.
We’d rarely talked over the last few years, ever since my sister had been brought into the ER after a car accident. Trent had made a fatal decision to deny me the chance to operate on her, ordering another surgeon to take the case.
He’d destroyed my life that day and taken hers.
As I watched him scurry away like the weasel he was, I ran my thumb over my inked hands, which memorialized that day.
I was done with hospital politics.
Even today, his control extended to what could or could not be done, protocols that tied a surgeon’s hands. Even when the outcome looked bleak, we had a chance—if we were allowed to do what needed to be done.
