"Thirty minutes."
I stepped out of the car. The night air hit me like a slap. Cold. Sharp. Real.
For a moment, I stood on the sidewalk, keys to my old life in one pocket, phone with Brian's unanswered calls in the other.
Then I crossed the street.
The night air was cold against my face, sharp with the smell of exhaust and cold metal. My heels clicked against the sidewalk as I crossed the street, each step carrying me closer to whatever waited inside.
The door was unlocked.
I pushed it open and stepped into soft lighting and the smell of garlic and wine. The restaurant was empty—chairs pushed in neatly, white tablecloths gleaming, everything arranged with care for a dinner service that wouldn't come.
But something was wrong.
The silence was too complete. No kitchen sounds, no distant hum of refrigeration. And underneath the smell of food?—
Chemical. Sweet. Wrong.
My medical training recognized it before my conscious mind caught up. Sevoflurane. An anesthetic gas. The kind used in operating rooms to put patients under before surgery.
It shouldn't be anywhere near a closed restaurant at midnight.
I turned to run.
The door clicked shut behind me. When I spun around, it wasn't Richard Lang standing there.
Kevin.
The name hit before the recognition did.
He looked nothing like the entitled young man who'd sprawled on my ER gurney months ago. Hollow-eyed, unshaven, his expensive clothes wrinkled and stained. But what froze me was the gas mask covering the lower half of his face—military-grade, the kind that filtered out everything.
Including whatever was already making my head swim.
"Dr. Rothwell." His voice was muffled through the mask, but I could hear the fractured edge underneath. The sound of a man who'd stopped sleeping days ago, who'd been running on chemicals and desperation ever since. "So glad you could make it."
"Kevin." I forced my voice to stay calm even as the edges of my vision started to blur. "Where's your father?"
He laughed. High and brittle, nothing like the arrogant confidence I remembered. "My father? He's busy giving interviews. Saving his precious career." He took a step closer, and I stumbled back into a table. "He doesn't have time for you anymore. You're someone else's problem now."
The gas was working faster than I'd calculated. Sevoflurane was potent—I'd seen it drop patients in minutes under controlled conditions. In a closed space like this, with no idea how long it had been building...
"I just want to talk," Kevin continued, almost conversationally. "That's all. Have a civilized conversation about how you destroyed my life."
"Kevin, listen to me—" My words were starting to slur. I gripped the edge of the table, fighting to stay upright. "Whatever you've done, whatever you're planning—this will only make things worse."
"Worse?" The word came out like a bark. "How could it possibly get worse? I'm going to prison. My father's going to prison. Everything we built—gone." He was pacing now, quick and jerky, the movements of a man holding himself together with wire and spite. "Because you couldn't keep your mouth shut about something I said when I was out of my mind."
"You killed a kid."
I don't know why I said it. The gas was making it hard to think, hard to filter what came out of my mouth. But the words landed like stones, and Kevin's whole body went rigid.
"It was an ACCIDENT." The scream echoed off the restaurant's walls. "I didn't see him! I didn't mean to?—"
He stopped. The mask made it impossible to read his expression, but I could see his hands shaking—the tremor of someone pushed far past their breaking point.
"You're the only one who heard," he said, and his voice had dropped to something almost calm. "The only witness. And once you're gone..."
