Chapter 6 - The Eight-Minute Rescue
I learned later that Vincent had been at a fundraising dinner on the Near North Side when my call came in.
He stepped away before dessert.
He did not ask questions first.
He only asked for the address.
I gave it between breaths while Derek pounded on the bathroom door and called me every name men use when women stop cooperating.
Vincent said, “Stay on the line.”
Then he hung up.
If you have never measured your survival in minutes, eight can sound short.
It is not.
Eight minutes is an ocean when a violent man is drinking outside a locked door.
By the time Derek broke through, my voice was gone from screaming his name to stop. My phone screen was cracked from where he had thrown it once already. My left arm burned under the bandage. My face was wet, though I could not tell if it was sweat or tears.
When Vincent’s voice came through the speaker and told me to stay alive, something inside me steadied.
Not because I trusted men in suits.
Because Camille had looked me in the eye and told me not to wait too long.
Because I had waited too long.
Because some tiny, dying part of me still wanted to live enough to believe help might really come.
Then Vincent did.
The bodyguards moved with brutal efficiency. One pinned Derek. The other checked the living room and bedroom in seconds, making sure we were alone. Vincent never raised his voice. He covered me with his jacket and looked at my arm, my cheek, the bruise flowering along my thigh, the scrape on my shoulder from where Derek had dragged me across the floor.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Don’t.”
He turned slightly and said, “Call Dr. Halpern. Call Ruiz. Tell them I want this documented before Holloway starts explaining.”
Derek snarled from the doorframe, “You can’t touch me. She’s my wife.”
Vincent rose slowly.
“No,” he said. “She’s the woman you assaulted.”
Then he took Derek’s own phone from the bathroom counter, unlocked it with Derek’s face while he was still fighting the grip of the bodyguard, and handed it to the second man.
“Preserve everything.”
Derek went still for the first time.
That told me there was more in that phone than adultery and ego.
Vincent looked back at me.
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
I should have resisted. I should have said I did not want more attention, more police, more forms, more explanations. Survival had trained me to fear systems almost as much as fists.
Instead, I asked the one question that mattered.
“Will he be able to get to me?”
Vincent’s expression did not change.
“No.”
That single word made something buckle in my chest so fast I had to cover my mouth.
Because in two years of marriage, no one had ever answered my fear that quickly.
Not a doctor. Not a neighbor. Not the building concierge who once saw Derek pin me to an elevator wall and stared at the numbers above our heads until the doors opened.
No.
Simple as that.
Definite.
Final.
The bodyguards dragged Derek upright.
Vincent extended his hand.
I put mine in it.
And together we walked out past the broken bathroom door, through the hallway Derek believed he ruled, and into the elevator where his bloodless, terrified face reflected back at him in all four mirrored walls.
The last thing he said before the doors closed was not I’m sorry.
May you like
It was, “Lena, don’t do this.”
As if this were something being done to him.
