Chapter 2 - The Emergency Room
Queens Memorial Hospital was drowning in chaos.
Paramedic radios blared in the ambulance bay. Stretcher wheels rattled against linoleum floors. Police officers stood near the triage doors, and exhausted nurses moved between trauma bays with clipboards and blood-pressure cuffs.
Hannah Miller had been on her feet for fourteen hours straight.
Her blue scrubs were stained with iodine and sweat, her light brown hair pulled back in a messy knot. She had just finished assisting with the stabilization of a six-year-old bus passenger when her phone buzzed in her pocket.
It was Mrs. Patterson, the elderly neighbor who watched Sophie.
Hannah answered quickly. “Mrs. Patterson? Is everything okay? I’m hoping to be off in two hours—”
“Hannah!” the woman’s voice was hysterical. “The police are at my door! Sophie isn’t in bed! Her raincoat is gone!”
Hannah’s heart stopped.
The clipboard slipped from her fingers, clattering loudly against the nurses' station floor.
“What?” Hannah screamed, the room spinning around her. “What do you mean she’s gone? Where is my daughter?!”
“I took a nap on the sofa, and when I woke up—”
Hannah didn't hear the rest. She dropped the phone and bolted toward the main hospital entrance, tears blinding her vision, her chest heaving with suffocating panic.
“Sophie!” she cried out as she burst through the sliding glass doors into the rain. “Sophie!”
“Mommy!”
Hannah froze.
Under the bright yellow emergency canopy, parked directly in the ambulance drop-off zone, was a fleet of three black Cadillac Escalades.
Standing beside the lead vehicle was a tall, imposing man in an immaculate charcoal wool coat.
And perched securely in his left arm, holding a hot chocolate cup in one hand and a one-eyed stuffed rabbit in the other, was Sophie.
“Sophie!” Hannah gasped, collapsing to her knees on the wet concrete.
Vincent walked forward, knelt smoothly despite his tailored trousers, and placed Sophie gently on her feet.
Sophie ran straight into her mother’s arms, burying her face in Hannah’s scrub top.
“I went on your date, Mommy!” Sophie announced happily. “Mr. Vincent got me whipped cream, and we rode in a big shiny truck with police buttons!”
Hannah sobbed, wrapping her arms so tightly around her daughter that she could barely breathe, kissing her hair, her forehead, her cheeks.
“You’re safe… God, you’re safe…” Hannah wept, trembling violently.
Then she looked up.
Vincent Mercer stood over them, his dark eyes steady, shielding both of them from the pouring rain with a large black umbrella he held in his right hand.
“You must be Hannah,” he said.
Hannah wiped her wet face, looking up at the man her best friend Rebecca had described as “a very private, very protective businessman.”
She didn't know he was the head of the Mercer syndicate.
All she saw was a man who had brought her daughter back unharmed.
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“You… you brought her here?” Hannah whispered, her voice cracking.
“She had a message to deliver,” Vincent replied calmly, extending a clean white handkerchief from his coat pocket. “And she was very clear that I shouldn't be angry with you.”
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