Bronwyn forced herself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way she did before making an incision.

"What do you want, Jennings?" Her voice was ice.

Jennings looked at her, his eyes traveling down her body with a familiarity that made her skin crawl. "I want you to remember your place. You were a project. An amusing diversion. You seem to have forgotten that."

"You're engaged," she said. "To my cousin."

"Tiffany is a merger," Jennings waved his hand dismissively. "She's boring. You... you have fire. It's a shame that fire is attached to such a worthless background."

"I would rather die," Bronwyn said.

Jennings' smile vanished. "Then watch Leo go to prison. I have the best lawyers in the city. We'll bury him."

A man in a sharp grey suit walked over to them. He handed Jennings a file folder.

"Mr. Bowen," the lawyer said, not even glancing at Bronwyn. "The arraignment judge has set bail. We argued for the maximum due to the flight risk and the severity of the injury."

"How much?" Bronwyn asked.

The lawyer looked at her then, his eyes flat. "Fifty thousand dollars."

Bronwyn felt the floor drop out from under her. She had four thousand dollars in her savings account. Maybe five if she sold her car.

Fifty thousand was impossible.

Jennings tapped the folder against his palm. "If you change your mind, my office will accept your signature at any time."

He turned and walked out, his lawyer trailing behind him like a shark's pilot fish.

A young female officer approached Bronwyn. She looked sympathetic. "You can see him for five minutes."

Bronwyn followed her into a small holding room. Leo was sitting at a metal table, his hands cuffed. His face was bruised, his lip split.

"Bron," he whispered. He looked so young. "I'm sorry. I saw the picture... I just saw red."

Bronwyn sat down and reached across the table, gripping his hands. "Don't apologize. I'm going to get you out."

Leo shook his head. "Don't ask him. Please, Bron. Don't beg him. I'd rather rot in here."

"I won't," she promised. "I'll find a lawyer. A real one."

The officer knocked on the door. "Time's up."

Bronwyn walked out of the precinct into the blinding afternoon sun. She pulled out her phone and called Chloe again.

"Put your brother on," Bronwyn said. "I know he's a defense attorney."

There was a muffled conversation on the other end. Then Chloe came back on.

"Bron... he says he can't."

"Why?"

"The Bowen family made calls," Chloe whispered. "They've blackballed the case. He says no firm in New York will touch it. It's a conflict of interest trap."

Bronwyn lowered the phone.

She was blocked. Everywhere.

She scrolled through her contacts. Desperation clawed at her throat. Her thumb hovered over a picture she had saved five years ago. A blurry shot of a man's back.

The contact was simply labeled 'Ghost'. Her own call sign in a world she had tried to escape.

No. She couldn't. That world was worse than Jennings. It was a different kind of monster.

A sleek black sedan pulled up to the curb right in front of her. The back window rolled down.

Victoria Bowen sat inside. Jennings' mother. She wore oversized sunglasses and a look of permanent disdain.

"Mrs. Bowen," Bronwyn said, stiffening.

"Get in," Victoria said. "We need to talk."

Bronwyn didn't move. She stood on the sidewalk, putting the car door between them.

"Say what you have to say from there," Bronwyn said.

Victoria lowered her sunglasses. Her eyes were cold, calculating. "I thought you understood five years ago that you aren't fit for my son."

"Your son is the one harassing me," Bronwyn shot back.

"Jennings is... spirited," Victoria said. "But I won't have you ruining his reputation or his engagement. This trial will be public. Messy."

"Then drop the charges."

"No," Victoria said. "Here is the deal. Make your brother plead guilty. I'll pull some strings with the judge. He'll go to a minimum-security facility upstate. Two years. Maybe eighteen months with good behavior."

"He's innocent of assault! It was a fight!"

"It doesn't matter what the truth is, Miss Brewer. It matters what we can prove. And we can prove whatever we want."

The window started to roll up.

"That's the best offer you'll get," Victoria said through the glass. "Reject it, and I'll make sure he gets ten years."

The car pulled away, spraying exhaust over Bronwyn's legs.

Bronwyn stood there, shaking. Two years. Leo would be destroyed in prison. He was soft, artistic. He wouldn't survive a week.

She needed money. She needed power.

Her phone rang. It was St. Jude's Hospital. The name sent a jolt through her; the Bowen Wing of St. Jude's was where she'd done her residency before they'd kicked her out.

"Miss Brewer? This is the ER. Your uncle... there was an accident at the construction site. He's listed as your emergency contact."

Her uncle. The man who had stolen her inheritance and kicked her out when she was sixteen.

But he was family. Technically. And maybe, just maybe, he knew something about her mother's papers.

She took the subway to the hospital. The ER was a war zone. A multi-car pileup on the I-95 had flooded the trauma bay. Doctors were shouting, nurses running.

Bronwyn pushed through the doors, looking for the intake desk.

And then she saw him.

Jennings Bowen.

He was standing near the nurses' station, wearing a dark suit, looking out of place amidst the blood and chaos. He was talking to the Hospital Administrator, looking bored.

He looked up and saw her. His eyes narrowed. He took in her disheveled hair, her pale face.

He said something to the Administrator, who stopped talking immediately. Jennings walked over to her.

"Here to sell alcohol to the patients?" he asked.

Bronwyn didn't have the energy to fight. "Move, Bowen."

He stepped in front of her, blocking her path. "Did you get my bill? Three thousand dollars for my shoes."

Bronwyn looked up at him. Her eyes were dry, burning. "I'll pay you. I'll sell my blood if I have to. Just get out of my way."

Something in her voice-the raw, unfiltered exhaustion-made him pause. The mockery slipped from his face.

"Who is Brewer?" a nurse shouted, running out of a trauma room. "Patient is crashing! We need a signature for surgery!"

Bronwyn shoved Jennings aside and ran toward the voice.

Jennings stood there, watching her go. He didn't leave. He followed.

The trauma bay was a slaughterhouse. Her uncle lay on the gurney, his face grey, a piece of rebar protruding from his abdomen.

A young resident was standing over him, hands shaking. "The attending is in with the pileup victims! I can't... I don't know where the bleeder is!"

The monitor screamed. Her uncle's blood pressure was tanking. 60 over 40.

Bronwyn looked at the wound. Her brain shifted gears. The noise of the room faded. The panic vanished. All that was left was anatomy.

"Spleen rupture," she said, her voice cutting through the noise. "Descending aorta compression. If you don't clamp it, he's dead in ninety seconds."

The resident looked at her, eyes wide. "You can't be in here! Family has to leave!"

Jennings was standing by the door. He watched Bronwyn. He saw the shift in her posture. The way her shoulders squared.

Bronwyn ignored the resident. She grabbed a pair of sterile gloves from the box on the wall and snapped them on.

"Give me the Kelly clamp," she ordered.

The authority in her voice was absolute. The resident, terrified and out of his depth, looked past her towards the door. Jennings gave a sharp, almost imperceptible nod. The resident handed her the instrument.

Bronwyn stepped up to the table. She didn't look at her uncle's face. She looked at the blood.

She plunged her hand into the open abdominal cavity.

Jennings watched, mesmerized. She wasn't fumbling. She wasn't guessing. She was moving with the precision of a machine.

"Suction," she commanded.

She felt the tear. She guided the clamp blindly, by feel alone. Click.

The monitor's screaming alarm stopped. The rhythm steadied.

"BP is stabilizing," the nurse said, sounding shocked.

Bronwyn withdrew her hand. Her gloves were soaked in red. She stripped them off and tossed them into the biohazard bin.

"He's stable," she told the resident. "Pack it and wait for the attending."

She turned and walked out of the trauma bay. Her adrenaline crashed instantly. Her knees buckled.

She leaned against the wall in the hallway, closing her eyes.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

She opened her eyes. Jennings was standing there. He wasn't looking at her like she was trash anymore. He was looking at her like she was a puzzle he couldn't solve.

"Classified," she said, her voice flat and hard. She pushed herself off the wall.

"Bullshit," Jennings said. "You did a blind clamp on a ruptured spleen. That's not a residency skill. That's the kind of high-risk maneuver whispered about in black-market clinics. They call the surgeon who can do it 'The Ghost'."

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, walking faster toward the exit.

Jennings kept pace with her. "You're lying. Who are you, Bronwyn?"

"None of your business."

The hallway started to tilt. The lack of food, the stress, the sight of blood-it was too much. Black spots danced in her vision.

She stumbled.

Jennings caught her elbow, his grip firm, stopping her fall but keeping a careful distance. He didn't pull her against him. He held her upright like a piece of valuable, but potentially contaminated, equipment.

"You look like a corpse," he said.

"Let me go," she mumbled.

"Shut up," he said. He signaled to one of his bodyguards who had been waiting silently down the hall. "Take her to the car. I'm not having her collapse in a hospital my family funds."