Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Evelyn's POV

Dr. Okafor found me in the ICU waiting room just after sunrise.

I knew him. I'd worked codes with him, passed him charts, shared bad coffee with him at three in the morning. The look on his face was the one we were all trained to wear, professionally gentle, and seeing it aimed at me made my knees go loose.

"Evelyn." He sat down next to me instead of standing over me. Small mercy. "It's an ischemic stroke. A significant one. We've started treatment, but there's swelling, and with her age and her heart condition..."

The words washed over me. Some of them landed. Intubated. The next seventy two hours are critical. Long term care. Rehabilitation, if she stabilizes.

If.

"Can her wolf..." He was pack. He'd understand. "Is her wolf helping at all?"

Dr. Okafor's jaw tightened. He shook his head slowly.

"Her wolf is too old, Evelyn. Too weak. Whatever healing she had left, it's gone. It's going to be machines and medicine from here. All of it human. All of it slow."

And all of it expensive. He didn't say that part. He didn't have to. I'd processed enough billing codes in six years to run the numbers in my head, and the numbers made me want to throw up.

ICU. Ventilator. Weeks of it. Then months of rehab, if we were lucky enough to need rehab.

"She has insurance," I said numbly. "And savings. She's been saving her whole life. She'll be okay. She has to be okay."

"Talk to the financial office when they open," he said gently. Then his eyes dropped to the borrowed cardigan I was clutching around myself, to the gray in my face. "And get yourself seen, Evelyn. You're bleeding through."

I looked down. He was right.

I didn't care.

The financial office opened at nine.

I sat across from a woman with kind eyes and a folder full of terrible news. She walked me through it slowly, the way you walk someone through a battlefield.

Insurance would cover a fraction. The deductible alone was more than I had in my account. The daily ICU rate made my vision swim. And that was before the ventilator, before the specialists, before the long term care facility she'd need if she survived the week.

"Most families set up a payment plan," the woman said. "And if your mother has savings, we can..."

"She does." I pulled out the worn envelope from Mom's kitchen drawer, the one with her account details in her careful handwriting. "She's been saving for thirty years. Cleaning houses. Taking in mending. It's not a fortune, but it's something."

The woman typed. Frowned. Typed again.

Then she turned the monitor toward me, and the floor dropped out of the world.

"Ma'am. This account was emptied four months ago."

The room tilted.

"That's not possible." My voice came out thin. "Emptied how? By who?"

She scrolled. "There's a transfer authorization on file. Signed. Notarized. It looks like the funds were moved into a business investment account." Her eyes flicked up at me, apologetic. "Whitmore Holdings."

Whitmore.

Marcus Whitmore.

My dead heart found something new to break against.

Four months ago. While I was ironing his shirts. While I was picking up double shifts to save for his anniversary watch. He'd sat in my mother's kitchen, drinking her tea, calling her Mom, and convinced her to sign her entire life over to his company.

And my mother, who trusted her Alpha son-in-law the way omegas are raised to trust, had signed.

"Can she get it back?" I heard myself ask. "It's her money. He took her money."

The woman's face was full of a pity I couldn't stand. "If it was signed and notarized, that's a legal matter. You'd need a lawyer. And those cases..." She hesitated. "They take years, ma'am. Even when they win."

Years.

My mother had seventy two hours.

I walked out of the financial office on legs I couldn't feel and stood in the hospital corridor, doing math that refused to add up.

I had eight hundred dollars in my checking account. A car worth maybe three thousand. A husband's house I'd been thrown out of. A job I'd have to beg to keep after missing my shifts, in the same building where my mother was dying, where everyone would know within a week that I was the rejected omega with the empty womb.

My phone buzzed. The hospital's first billing notice. They don't waste time.

I stared at the number until it blurred.

Then I did what I always do when I'm drowning. I made a list. Sell the car, take the bus. Pick up night shifts, if they'd have me. Payment plan. Second job. Third job.

I ran the numbers three times.

It didn't matter how I stacked them. Honest work paid in weeks and months. The machines keeping my mother alive charged by the hour.

There was no version of the math where she lived and I stayed the good girl I'd always been.

I leaned my head back against the corridor wall and closed my eyes, and a memory floated up from another life.

Tasha. We'd done our rotations together, years ago, before she quit nursing for a different kind of work. The kind she never talked about in detail. The kind that paid in cash, every night, no questions asked.

The last time I ran into her, she was wearing a coat that cost more than my car, and she'd laughed at the look on my face.

If you ever get desperate, Evie, really desperate, call me. One phone call. That's all it takes.

I'd laughed too, back then. I had a husband. A home. A future. Girls like me didn't need phone calls like that.

I wasn't laughing now.

I scrolled to her name with a thumb that didn't shake anymore. Somewhere behind the ICU doors, a machine was breathing for my mother, and every breath cost money I didn't have.

I pressed call.

She picked up on the second ring, music thumping somewhere behind her voice.

"Well, well. Evelyn Carter." I could hear the smile in it. "To what do I owe the miracle?"

"Tasha." My voice was steady. Cold and clear as the thing that had settled inside me on my mother's kitchen floor. "I need a job. A real one. Cash. I don't care what it is."

A pause. The music thumped. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped low, amused and dangerous all at once.

"Then you called the right girl, babe. The Crimson Den always needs pretty girls who know how to keep their mouths shut."