Chapter 3 - Beneath the SteelThe moment I stepped outside, the wind hit me like a physical wall, knocking the breath straight out of my lungs. The temperature was so low it felt like inhaling shards of broken glass. Visibility was zero; I couldn't see my own outstretched hand.
“Adrian!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, but the gale snatched my voice away instantly, tossing it into the dark abyss of the storm.
Holding tightly onto the safety rope I had anchored to the door handle, I plunged blindly into the knee-deep drifts toward the rear perimeter gate. The snow swirled in a chaotic, blinding dance, freezing my eyelashes together and numbing my cheeks within seconds.
I trudged forward, fighting every inch of the way, my boots sinking deep into the heavy, shifting powder.
As I neared the old carriage house and the rear boundary wall, my foot caught on something hard buried beneath the drifts. I stumbled hard, falling forward into the snow, and reached down to clear the area with my mittened hands.
Metal. Cold, twisted steel.
The heavy iron security awning over the secondary generator shed had snapped completely off its brick moorings under the weight of accumulated ice and gale-force winds, collapsing directly onto the gravel pathway.
And pinned underneath the mangled framework lay a heavy, unmoving form.
“Adrian!” I gasped, scrambling frantically through the snow.
I dug my hands into the frozen drifts, pulling aside heavy blocks of ice and twisted metal until I uncovered his face.
Adrian Cross was unconscious. His skin was the color of old parchment, his lips were tinted a frightening, deep blue, and a jagged laceration across his temple was crusted with frozen blood. When I pressed two fingers frantically against his carotid artery, his pulse was erratic, impossibly slow, and dangerously faint.
He was suffering from severe, advanced hypothermia. His core body temperature was crashing toward the fatal threshold.
“Come on, you stubborn bastard, stay with me,” I muttered, panic surging through my veins.
Using every ounce of adrenaline and raw physical strength I possessed, I grabbed the heavy steel beam of the collapsed awning and heaved upward with a guttural cry. My muscles screamed in protest, my back burning as I used my legs to leverage the weight off his chest. With a sharp metallic groan, the framework shifted just enough.
I hooked my arms underneath Adrian’s broad shoulders and dragged him backward out from beneath the wreckage.
He weighed nearly two hundred pounds, dead weight in heavy winter clothing, and hauling him through knee-deep, blinding snow back toward the mansion felt like dragging a mountain. Every step was an excruciating battle against the wind and the freezing cold. My lungs burned like fire, and my legs felt like lead weights.
Just keep moving, I chanted to myself over and over. Do not let him die here.
How I managed to haul him across the yard, force the service door open, and collapse inside the warm mudroom, I will never truly know.
The moment we were inside, I kicked the heavy door shut, locking out the howling blizzard.
I collapsed onto the tiled floor beside him, gasping for air, my chest heaving, my hands shaking uncontrollably from exertion and the sudden drop in adrenaline.
Adrian was completely unresponsive. He lay sprawled across the floor, shivering violently in a grotesque, involuntary seizure as his body desperately tried to generate heat it no longer possessed. A burning, raging fever had begun to spike beneath his skin, clashing horribly with the deep chill of his outer limbs—a classic, terrifying sign of severe systemic shock.
I crawled over to him and checked his pockets. His expensive satellite phone was soaked through and utterly dead, the screen cracked and black.
I scrambled to the kitchen landline. Dead tone. The blizzard had severed the master telephone lines miles down the highway.
I ran to the front windows and looked out toward the main gates. The private road was buried under five feet of packed snowdrifts. No ambulance was getting through this weather. No emergency service on earth was going to reach the Cross estate tonight.
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Clutching the edge of the kitchen island, I looked back down the dimly lit hallway toward where Adrian lay shivering on the floor, slipping closer to unconscious death with every passing minute.
His life—the cold, ruthless mafia boss who had treated me like dirt on my very first day—depended entirely on me.
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