Eighteen Hours

Aurora didn’t call a car.

She walked barefoot under the cold evening rain, still in the ivory slip dress, pearls tangled in her hair and dried tears on her face.

She walked all the way back to the Sterling residence. The home Ethan had given her five years ago.

The fingerprint scanner flashed green the moment she pressed her hand on it and the front door was opened.

It was dark inside. No lights left on. Just silence and the faint smell of his cologne hanging in the air like a bad memory.

Aurora stood in the corridor and looked at the life she was leaving behind.

The leather chair he always sat in. The espresso machine she researched for weeks just to get him the right one.

The large framed photo on the wall above the stairs, Aurora smiled with her head on Ethan’s shoulder.

She walked over and ripped it off the wall.

The frame hit the floor and the glass shattered. She bend down, picked up a shard and dragged it on his face in the photo.

Ethan’s face blurred as a small cut from the glass shard caught her finger and began to bleed. She didn’t feel the pain.

She tore her half of the photo and dropped it into the trash. Then she went upstairs to pack.

She moved around the bedroom, taking her things from the drawers and shelves.

Seven years, and everything that truly belonged to her could fit into two bags.

The jewelry Ethan had given her, the clothes he had bought for her, and everything else that had become part of their life.

She left them all behind.

She was halfway through folding a sweater when her phone rang.

“Aurora.” Her best friend Mira’s voice came through broken with panic. “Something’s happened. The Sterling family, they’ve had your mother moved out of the private ICU.”

Aurora froze,

“What”

“They cut off her medication. Aurora, they pulled the Nightbloom Serum. The doctors are saying if she doesn’t get it back within eighteen hours….”

The sweater dropped from Aurora’s hands.

“….She won’t make it through tomorrow night.”

Aurora was shaking when the call ended.

She grabbed her keys and ran down the stairs. She got into her car and drove out before she could even catch her breath.

She was driving too fast. Her hands were shaking so badly that she could barely hold the steering wheel.

Ethan.

Her mother had been in that facility for three years. For three years, she had been kept alive with Nightbloom Serum, the only drug that could keep her condition stable.

And Ethan controlled the supply. DeepBlue Biotech, the research arm of Sterling Pharma, was licensed to distribute it.

He had promised Aurora from the very start that her mother would be cared for. That the serum would never stop, that whatever happened between them, her mother was safe.

He had made that promise with his arms around her in a hospital corridor, while she stood in a surgical gown with bandaged hands. She had believed him completely.

And he had been waiting for the right moment to use it against her.

A horn blared suddenly from her left.

Aurora pulled the wheel hard and the tires screeched.

Then

CRASH.

The car slammed hard into the guardrail and the airbag exploded in her face.

At that same moment, in a private room on the fourth floor of Sterling Medical, the heart monitor beside Aurora’s mother flatlined.

The nurses came running.

Across the city, Ethan Sterling stood at his study window.

He had personally escorted Chloe back to the guest suite of his estate.

His butler knocked.

“Sir. The hospital has confirmed that Mrs. Vale’s Nightbloom Serum supply has been discontinued as instructed. The attending doctor says that if the serum isn’t reinstated within eighteen hours, she won’t survive.”

Ethan raised one hand and the butler stopped talking.

“I know.” His voice was completely cold and unbothered.

He turned from the window.

“Has Aurora come back yet?”

“No sir. No contact. Should I send someone to locate her?”

“Don’t bother.” He smiled coldly “Where would she go? She’ll cry to that friend of hers, exhaust every option, and hit dead end. There’s nowhere for her to go.”

He moved to his desk, opened the top drawer and bring out a document. A contract.

“When she made every call she can make and every door stays closed,” he said quietly, smoothing the top page with one finger, “she’ll finally understand that I am the only person in this world who can save her mother.”

The butler hesitated. “And if she comes asking for the serum, sir?”

“Tell her the terms are simple.” He tapped the contract once. “She signs this. She goes to Chloe personally and apologizes on her knees. And then she comes home and behaves like the woman I need her to be.”

Ethan turned back to the window.

Aurora had nowhere else to go.

He was sure of it.