Chapter 5 - An Unpayable Bill
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Marin met Elias's gaze without flinching. The silence between them grew so dense that the hum of the old refrigerator sounded like a roar.
"If I wanted your mother dead, Mr. Ferrante," Marin said quietly, "she would have stopped breathing fourteen months ago. I wouldn't have spent four hundred nights reading her the obituary section of the local newspaper."
Elias stared at her, his jaw clenching. He realized she was telling the absolute truth. A killer wouldn't spend over a year carefully monitoring pupillary responses and manually suctioning phlegm at three in the morning.
"Who are you?" Elias asked again, his tone shifting from suspicion to absolute intrigue.
"I'm someone who wanted a quiet job where nobody shoots at me," Marin replied. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to sleep. My next shift starts at ten tonight."
Elias let out a short, incredulous laugh. "You think you're going back to normal? Miss Hollis, my mother's bedroom is a crime scene. Half my security team is currently being interrogated in a cellar downtown, and whoever bought those hitmen knows you ruined their plan."
Marin closed her eyes briefly. "They don't know my name."
"They know your face," Elias stepped closer, his cologne—expensive tobacco and cedar—filling her space. "And in my world, when an operation fails, the contractors come back to clean up the witnesses."
"I can handle myself."
"I know you can," Elias said, his voice dropping to a low velvet whisper. "That's why you're not staying in this firetrap. You're coming back to the estate. Not as an hourly nurse. As my mother's personal detail."
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"I don't work for mob bosses," Marin said coldly.
Elias reached into his coat and pulled out a heavy envelope, tossing it onto her table. "That's fifty thousand dollars cash. It's your retaining fee for the week. You have two choices, Marin. You come with me and stay safe inside my fortress... or you walk out that door and let the men who turned off the power find out how good your field sutures really are."
