Chapter 2 –CRESCENT MOON
They told her later that she had been clinically dead for forty-seven seconds.
Forty-seven seconds in which her heart forgot its rhythm, her lungs forgot their purpose, and $11.2 billion proved itself utterly worthless against the simple mathematics of oxygen and blood.
She remembered none of it.
What she remembered was the voice.
"Stay with me. I've got you."
Low, steady, male. A voice that refused to let the dark have the final word.
She remembered the drag of rough hands under her arms, the scrape of glass across her back, the rain on her face like cold needles. She remembered trying to focus on the man bent over her and failing, because the world kept sliding sideways.
And she remembered the crescent moon.
White, perfect, curved like a scythe on the back of his right hand.
Then nothing.
When consciousness returned three days later, it came in pieces.
First the beeping—steady, mechanical, infuriating.
Then the smell: antiseptic, copper, the faint ghost of gasoline that no amount of hospital soap could scrub from her skin.
Then the pain. A bright, singing agony in her left leg that made her gasp aloud.
"Ms. Lennox?" A nurse appeared, young, wide-eyed, hands already reaching for the morphine button. "You're awake. You're safe."
Victoria tried to speak and managed only a rasp. Her throat felt lined with sandpaper.
Mara was there in under four minutes, heels clicking across linoleum like gunfire. She looked like she hadn't slept in days—hair escaping its chignon, eyes red-rimmed behind the Chanel glasses.
"Victoria." One word, cracked in the middle.
Victoria lifted a hand—IV lines tugging at the tape—and managed, "Water."
Mara held the straw to her lips herself. Victoria drank greedily, then fixed her assistant with the stare that had made grown men resign in tears.
"Who pulled me out?"
Mara's face crumpled. "No one knows. The traffic cams on that stretch were down—storm took out the power grid. The Uber driver was unconscious. First responders found you on the shoulder twenty feet from the wreckage. Alone."
Victoria closed her eyes.
She saw the crescent moon again, glowing like neon behind her lids.
"Find him," she said.
Mara hesitated. "The police—"
"I don't want the police." Victoria's voice was hoarse but absolute. "I want him."
She spent twenty-one days in the hospital.
Twenty-one days of titanium rods and screws, of surgeons who spoke in hushed tones about how lucky she was that the femoral artery had missed being severed by millimeters, of private nurses who flinched every time she looked at them.
She fired two physical therapists for suggesting a cane.
On day ten she stood for the first time, gripping the parallel bars while her new therapist—a former Army medic who didn't flinch—counted repetitions. Sweat poured down her face. Her left leg trembled like a newborn foal's.
"Again," she snarled through clenched teeth.
On day fourteen she walked the length of the corridor unaided, silk robe flapping open, IV pole dragging behind her like a battle standard. A hedge-fund billionaire in the next suite recorded it on his phone. The clip was online within minutes. She had it taken down in seven.
On day eighteen she demanded her laptop.
Mara brought it with shaking hands.
Victoria opened the traffic-cam footage herself—grainy, useless, blacked out by the storm. She watched it seventeen times anyway, frame by frame, until her eyes burned.
Nothing.
No ghost. No savior. No crescent moon.
On day twenty-one they discharged her with a bottle of OxyContin she flushed down the penthouse toilet the moment she got home and a limp she refused to acknowledge.
The first thing she did when the private ambulance deposited her in the TriBeCa garage was walk—slowly, deliberately—to the mangled remains of the Bugatti.
The tow company had stored it in a climate-controlled warehouse in Red Hook at her request. The car looked like a crushed black insect, roof peeled open like a tin can, blood still crusted on the driver's seat—her blood.
She stood in front of it for a long time, barefoot on the concrete, wearing leggings and one of Elias's hoodies she hadn't yet admitted she'd stolen from the lost-and-found at the shelter.
(She didn't know his name was Elias yet. She only knew the hoodie smelled like cedar and engine grease and safety.)
A forensic team had already combed the wreckage. No fingerprints but hers and the Uber driver's. No DNA but hers. No trace of the man who had dragged her free.
She reached out and touched the jagged edge where the roof had sheared away. A flake of dried blood came off on her finger.
She brought it to her lips and tasted iron.
"I will find you," she whispered to the empty warehouse.
Four months later—February, gray and bitter—she was running again.
Not gracefully. Not yet. But running.
The penthouse gym overlooked the Hudson. Treadmill set to 8.5 mph, incline at 6. She punished her body the way she had once punished markets—relentlessly, joylessly, until it obeyed.
She was mid-stride, sweat dripping from her jaw, music blasting something with a beat designed to drown thought, when the sprinkler system in the kitchen decided to baptize the marble like a repentant sinner.
Mara swore creatively and called an emergency plumber from the pre-approved list.
Victoria didn't stop running.
She heard the freight elevator ding. Heard Mara's murmured instructions. Heard heavy footsteps cross the oak.
And then he walked past the glass wall of the gym.
Faded gray hoodie. Jeans worn soft at the knees. Tool belt slung low on narrow hips. Dark hair curling at the nape of his neck. Shoulders that looked like they could carry the world if it asked nicely.
He lifted his right hand to scratch the back of his neck.
Crescent moon.
White. Perfect. Unmistakable.
Victoria hit the emergency stop so hard she nearly flew off the treadmill.
She stood there, chest heaving, staring at the man who had pulled her from death and vanished like smoke.
He didn't look at her. He was already kneeling by the sprinkler junction box, tool roll spread open like a surgeon's kit, completely unaware that the most dangerous woman in New York had just recognized the mark on his hand.
Victoria's pulse thundered in her ears louder than any stock exchange bell.
She reached for her phone with shaking fingers and typed a single message to Mara.
Find out everything.
His name, his blood type, his childhood dog's name.
Everything.
Because Victoria Lennox did not like debts.
And this one was written in blood, moonlight, and forty-seven seconds of death.
She would pay it.
Whether he wanted her to or not.