NATHAN CROSS STRIKE BACK..

Chapter 10

But when it destabilized

When the condition spiked without warning  triggered by stress or cold or extreme emotional disturbance the body's temperature could drop to genuinely dangerous levels fast. Not just uncomfortable. Dangerous. Organ-threatening. The kind of cold that spread outward from the person's skin and affected the immediate environment around them.

Anyone who touched her right now without preparation would find their own body temperature dropping at the point of contact. Not frostbite. Not immediate danger for a healthy adult. But disorienting and unpleasant enough that untrained people would instinctively pull back.

And for her without intervention she will die.

He started walking toward the circle..

“Sir.” A wall of suit appeared in front of him immediately. One of the bodyguards. A big man who moved with quiet professional efficiency. 

“This area is restricted. Please keep moving.”

“I need to get through,” Nathan said. “The woman on the ground. I can help her.”

“Sir.” The man's voice was flat and final. "Move along."

“I am not going to touch anything I should not touch. I just need to—”

“Oh it's you Nathan Cross."

A different voice. Sharp. Coming from behind the wall of suits.

A woman pushed through not a bodyguard. Smaller. Professional clothes. A tablet in her hand and an expression on her face like she had already decided what she thought about the next five minutes.

Claire.

She looked at him with an expression that started at cold and moved quickly toward something much less professional.

“So it is you,” she said.

Her voice carried the particular tone of someone who had been waiting for a specific type of unpleasant thing to appear and was unsurprised but still irritated that it had.

“You need to step back,” Nathan said. “The woman on the ground—”

“Yes.” Claire cut him off. “The woman on the ground. That is exactly what I want to talk to you about.” She held up her tablet and turned it so he could see the screen.

His own face. Old professional photographs from when NeuroGen was in the news. Articles. His name in large text above words like “fraud” and “plagiarism” and “criminal investigation.”

“Nathan Cross,” she said again. Like she was reading out a charge. “Founder of NeuroGen Solutions. Exposed as having stolen core research data from Holt Empire. Currently facing federal investigation for intellectual property theft. Reputation in the gutter. Company dissolved. Career finished.” She lowered the tablet. “And now here. At this exact location. At the exact same time as my employer.”

“I was walking past,” Nathan said. “I smelled—”

“You smelled.” She repeated it with the specific tone of someone who found that deeply suspicious. 

“You smelled something. And that brought you here. To where she is.” She stepped closer.

“Do you understand how this looks? Because I will tell you how it looks. It looks like a man who has lost everything and is desperate enough to try anything decided to research a wealthy young woman, follow her movements, and show up at exactly the right moment to insert himself into a crisis so he can what  demand payment for help? Work his way into her circle? Find a new mark to steal from since your last scheme fell apart?”

“That is not—”

“You stole from people, and you're still stealing.” she said. “That is established fact. Public record. You built a company on stolen research and when it fell apart you left your colleagues and business partners holding the consequences. And now after everything that happened after every person you hurt you are standing here telling me you just happened to walk past.” She looked at the bodyguards.

“Get him out of here.”

Two men moved toward Nathan.

Nathan stepped back automatically. His hands came up — not threatening, just creating space.

The old Nathan would have argued. Would have tried to explain. Would have let the injustice of it bother him enough to make noise about it.

This Nathan knew exactly what had happened to his reputation and exactly who had made it happen and exactly why nothing he said to this woman right now was going to change what she had been told and believe.

At that moment he turned to leave, he had made it two steps.

And then he heard her.

A sound from the woman on the ground. A sound low and strained and tight with pain  that reached through the noise of the train station and hit him directly.

He stopped.

He stood with his back to the circle of bodyguards and the hostile secretary and the wall of suits.

He thought about last night.

He had no clear memory of what had happened. But he had the card in his pocket with thirty thousand dollars in it. He had the perfume on his clothes. He had the hospital room where someone had paid for private care and left him money and said nothing and asked for nothing.

She had not known him. She had found him collapsed on a road and brought him in and paid for his medical care and left him two million dollars and walked away without leaving a name.

He turned back around.

Claire's expression shifted slightly when she saw his face.

“I know what is wrong with her,” Nathan said. His voice was completely calm. 

“Not guessing. I know exactly what is happening to her right now and I know what will happen if she does not get proper intervention in the next few minutes.”

“We have a doctor coming—”

“How long?”

A flicker across Claire's face. “Twenty minutes.”

“She does not have twenty minutes,” Nathan said. Not dramatically. Just as a fact. 

“The condition she has — when it spikes like this it accelerates. Her core temperature is dropping right now and it will not stop on its own. Medication will not reach her fast enough to matter. What she needs is someone who understands how to manually stabilize her thermal regulation and redirect the energy buildup away from her vital organs.”

Claire stared at him.

“You cannot touch her,” she said, but the certainty had gone out of her voice slightly.

“I know,” Nathan said. 

“I am not going to touch her. There is a method. A specific technique. It does not require direct skin contact for the initial stabilization.” He looked past Claire to the woman on the ground. 

“But it requires someone who knows what they are doing. And right now I am the only person standing here who does.”

“And you think I will believe these nonsense you just vomited, you are a pharmaceutical researcher,” Claire said. 

“Not a medical practitioner. You do not have a clinical license. You have no business—”

“Claire.”

The voice came from the ground.

Barely above a whisper. Strained and tight with effort. But clear.

Everyone went still.

The woman on the ground had turned her head. Her eyes were open. They were fixed on Nathan with an expression that was complicated and exhausted and something else underneath both of those things that he could not name from where he was standing.

“Miss Sterling, you should not be—”

“Stop.”  Then a pause while she gathered what little energy she had. “Let him try.” A breath. 

“I am in so much pain.”