Chapter 2 - The Crowned Wraith at Providence
The words fell into the emergency room like heavy iron weights.
Christopher Harrington took two stumbling steps backward, his back slamming against the plastic waiting room partition. His hands began to shake so violently that his car keys fell to the linoleum with a sharp, echoing clatter.
He had spent five years running high-stakes illegal casinos in Macau and Vancouver before returning to Alaska to leech off his father's estate. He knew the stories whispered in the VIP backrooms across the Pacific: the Crimson Shadow was not a man you bargained with; he was a natural disaster in a tailored suit, commanding fleets of container ships, private intelligence hubs, and an untouchable army of operatives that answered to no government.
And that sovereign beast was Samantha’s quiet, sweater-wearing husband who drove a seven-year-old Subaru and made her blueberry pancakes every Sunday morning.
Rosalind tried to maintain her aristocratic sneer, clutching her fur coat tightly around her shoulders, though the sudden tremor in her chin betrayed her terror.
"Gareth, don't be ridiculous!" Rosalind snapped, raising her voice to draw the attention of the hospital security guards. "Samantha was intoxicated! She stumbled out of the side door after an argument! We came here out of maternal concern to ensure she was treated!"
I didn't answer her. I didn't even blink.
Dr. Aaron Bennett, the chief trauma surgeon on duty, looked from the crowned-wraith insignia on my shoulder to the pale, shivering woman on the stretcher.
"Internal core temperature is 31 degrees Celsius," Dr. Bennett announced with urgent authority. "Stage-two severe hypothermia, deep contusions along the left zygomatic arch, and suspected hairline fractures on her fifth and sixth ribs. Prep Trauma Bay 1 for active re-warming and full contrast CT scans!"
I gently rested my hand against Samantha's icy cheek, feeling the faint, fluttering pulse beneath her jaw.
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"You're safe now, my love," I whispered in her ear. "The monsters will never touch you again."
I stood up straight, pulling my dark cashmere coat over my shoulders, turning slowly to face the mother and brother who had left my wife to die in twenty-below-zero frost.
