Chapter 6 - The Unflinching Mirror
Ethan did not move for several long seconds. His analytical mind was working through the acoustic data she had provided. Her voice had no tremor. Her breathing was slow, even, and unobstructed by the tight, shallow rhythm of anxiety. There was no hesitation in her cadence, none of the patronizing, slow enunciation people instinctively used when speaking to the disabled. She had addressed him not as an invalid to be coddled, nor as a crime boss to be placated, but simply as the master of the house who had a preference for how his rooms were kept.
It was an anomaly. And in Ethan Mercer’s world, anomalies were either hidden threats or calculated deceptions.
He slowly shifted his weight, leaning his back against the high leather arm of the chesterfield chair behind him. His left hand slipped into the pocket of his trousers, while his right kept the white cane balanced against his thigh. He lowered his chin slightly, angling his face toward her with an expression of sharp, skeptical scrutiny.
"Did she tell you I fire people easily?" Ethan asked, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly register that usually made seasoned union bosses rethink their demands.
Claire didn't hesitate. "She did."
"She tell you the last one lasted less than seventy-two hours?"
"She mentioned forty-eight," Claire corrected mildly, her tone carrying the faintest trace of pragmatic dry humor. "She said the girl couldn't handle your tone."
Ethan’s brows lifted a millimeter. He was unaccustomed to being corrected on any subject, let alone the timeline of his own abrasive outbursts. "And you still came?"
"Yes, sir."
Ethan leaned forward slightly, closing the distance between them by a fraction of an inch, his sightless eyes narrowing as if trying to bore through the darkness to inspect the woman standing before him. For the first time since the lights had gone out on that rain-slicked highway, a genuine, sharp curiosity pierced through the suffocating fog of his bitterness.
"Why?" Ethan asked.
The question was blunt, stripped of all corporate or domestic pleasantries. He wanted to know the angle. Was she an operative planted by the Lucchese family in New York? Was she an undercover journalist looking to write an expose on the fallen king of the eastern docks? Or was she merely desperate for the exorbitant salary Margaret was undoubtedly offering from his accounts?
Claire looked directly into his dark, unfocused eyes. She did not look at the white cane. She did not look at the subtle, defensive tension in his broad shoulders. She looked at the man himself—isolated, proud, and surrounded by people who either feared his power or pitied his ruin.
"Because losing your sight doesn't mean you stopped being a person," Claire said.
The words were spoken without theatrical emphasis, delivered with the quiet, matter-of-fact certainty of someone stating that water was wet or that stone was hard.
The great room seemed to instantly drop in temperature.
The two guards by the window visibly stiffened, one of them drawing in a sharp, horrified breath through his teeth. No one spoke to Ethan Mercer with such unvarnished, naked familiarity. It was an intolerable breach of deference; it was an open acknowledgment of the very vulnerability he had spent four weeks trying to obliterate with rage.
Ethan went completely, utterly still.
May you like
The breath caught in the back of his throat. The cold, practiced venom he had prepared for her died on his tongue. For twenty-eight days, he had been treated as two mutually exclusive entities: by his associates, he was a wounded titan whose weakness had to be concealed before rivals smelled blood; by his doctors and caretakers, he was a tragic clinical case, a fragile shell to be steered around coffee tables and spoken to with soft, patronizing condolences.
No one—not his captains, not his doctors, not even Margaret—had looked past the blindness to simply state the obvious: that he was still Ethan Mercer. That his humanity, his intellect, his dignity had not been erased when his vision died.
