Hmm, if he can do it, I guess I can, too.
“I… I’ll think about it.”
Trace squeezes my shoulder again and lowers his voice. “Cormac, you deserve to love someone. And be loved. And your son deserves to know the man you are now. The man you worked to become. Someone he can look up to.”
I turn my head. “Who the fuck would ever choose me?”
“A professor at the most prestigious medical college in the country, plus one who’s richandhandsome? You’ll find someone in a week.”
Scarlett’s face flashes in my mind again. In a short amount of time, she made me want her, made me forget that I wasn’t unworthy.
Trace stares at me, like he knows I’m thinking of someone specific. I shut that down, or he’ll have a damn drone following me around.
Silence stretches between us, heavy and strained. His hand finally falls from my shoulder.
“Just think about what you want more,” Trace adds gently. “Your pride or your son.”
A full-time job at a school like Hamilton will make me look stable to Darragh and Ana.
And that’s more important than anything else.
Chapter 14
Cormac
Aweek later, I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork and lesson planning for a class that starts the following week, when I get a text from my contact at Monroe.
An order for a hit.
Ihaveto wind down this side of my life, because my future as a professor with a wife and J.P. in my life, I can’t just disappear to go murder someone. But I’m climbing the walls and need the adrenalin rush I get from this kind of vengeance. At least it feels as if I’m doing something good.
It’s that thought that has me responding to the text before heading to my closet to prep for the kill. Gloves, Glock, Sig as a backup, knife as a last resort.
Dressed all in black, I leave to meet Dr. Davis Harrow, a medical toxicologist at Monroe Hospital, who supplies me with the fentanyl cocktail. He’s an attending at the Poison Response & Clinical Toxicology Unit and one of the doctors who calls the time of death on overdose victims. And he does it way more often than he cares to.
In one of the bays behind an ambulance that just came in, I wait for Harrow. Sirens echo off the concrete overhang as a paramedic wheels in a guy who’s bleeding through a pressure bandage.
The stench of disinfectant hits me like a slap. Its sharp, chemical sting sours the humid night air.
I spot the toxicologist, late 50’s, coming to meet me in the corner of one bay. He looks like he’s aged ten years since I saw him last. In wrinkled scrubs and hair sticking up like he’s been pulling at it, he gives me a weak smile. He looks like he’s had a rough night. Like every hour has gnawed off a piece of him.
“Dr. O’Rourke,” he mutters, voice thin.
“Dr. Harrow, how have you been?” I say, as we always repeat this dance.
Like we’re just two colleagues catching up out of nowhere.
But Harrow flinches. “Been better.”
The man saved my life in the California rehab facility. He’d lost his own daughter to drugs and had a touch I trusted and a willingness to listen. He developed a detox program that worked. Until I took advantage of his trust and snuck out when I heard the Vegas Cosa Nostra put a bounty on Ana’s head and mercenaries figured out she was in Seattle.
“You look like hell,” I tell him.
He huffs a humorless laugh. “The cases just keep coming. Kids dying on a playground after finding a used syringe of fentanyl. Women taking what they think is Percocet, but it’s laced with the stuff that stops their hearts cold. We thought the crack epidemic was bad.” He shakes his head, his spirit crushed by senseless deaths. “Meanwhile, these dealers walk away free because some high-priced lawyer with a smarmy grin and no moral fortitude finds some damn loophole.”
Harrow’s hands shake as he lights a cigarette. I say nothing because he doesn’t need to hear from me how bad smoking is for him. Taking a deep inhale, he reaches into his coat for the supplies I need to facilitate my next kill.
My muscles tighten for the first time since I started this. I’m one week away from staring into the eyes of young minds who dedicated their lives to saving people while I’m out executing them.