NATHAN CROSS STRIKE BACK..

Chapter 8

The nurse stared at him.

He could understand why. From the outside this made no sense. A man brought in barely conscious in the middle of the night, standing up the next morning like he had slept well and was ready for breakfast.

“It is a miracle you survived,” the nurse said. She sounded like she meant it. 

“The lady who brought you in — she said she found you collapsed on the road. When the attending first saw you he thought” She stopped herself. 

“You should not even be standing right now.”

“I know,” Nathan said quietly. 

“But I am. Thank you for looking after me.”

He looked around the room for his clothes.

They were folded on the chair in the corner. Someone had done their best with them but they were still torn. He picked them up.

The smell hit him immediately.

Underneath the blood and the sweat underneath all of it there was a fragrance. Subtle but unmistakable. Rich in a way and he could tell this wasn't an ordinary cheap perfume. Like something made from rare things by someone who understood what rare things were worth.

He held the shirt for a moment and breathed it in.

A woman's perfume, he stood very still.

Fragments came back. Not clear — not a full memory  but fragments. The back of a car. Warmth. A face he could not quite focus on but knew was extraordinary. A feeling of heat moving through him that had nothing to do with temperature.

“Was that real?”

He looked around the room and then saw it.

On the small table beside the bed.

A bank card. And a small piece of paper with a PIN written on it in neat handwriting.

He walked to the table and picked up the card.

He turned it over, no name on the front. Just a bank logo and a card number.

He held it and the fragments came back stronger. The back seat of a car. A woman. The warmth from her presence mixing with the energy from the mark on his chest. Her face close to his in the dark.

“I thought it was a dream.”

He pressed his hand over his eyes for a moment.

“It was not a dream.”

There had been a woman. A real woman. She had found him on the road. She had brought him here. She had left him money.

He had no clear memory of her face. He had no idea who she was. He did not know her name or where she came from or why she had helped him.

But the perfume on his clothes was not ordinary and the card in his hand was real and somewhere in this city there was a woman who had done something for him last night that he could not fully remember but could not dismiss.

“I need to figure this out,” he thought. 

“Later. I need to figure all of this out later.”

Right now he had more immediate problems.

Derek Holt did not know he was alive. Serena did not know he was alive. They had thrown him into a garbage yard to be crushed with the morning waste and as far as they knew that was exactly what had happened.

He needed to keep it that way.

If Derek found out he had survived he would not make the same mistake twice. He would not send men with baseball bats next time. He would do something cleaner and more permanent.

Nathan needed to stay invisible until he was ready.

And to stay invisible he needed resources. Money of his own. A place to think.

However he immediately felt his phone inside his pocket abd brought it out.

He found the ATM app on his phone. His phone had survived the night somehow cracked screen, barely charged, but working. He typed in the card number and the PIN from the piece of paper.

The balance loaded.

He read it, he read it again.

Two million dollars.

He stood in the hospital room in his torn clothes and stared at the number on his cracked phone screen.

Two. Million. Dollars.

On a card left on a table beside his hospital bed by a woman he could barely remember. A woman whose face he could not clearly picture. A woman whose name he did not know.

He stayed very still for a long moment.

Then he put the card in his pocket.

“I am giving this back.” he thought firmly. “wherever she is — I will find her and I will pay back every single dollar.”

He was not going to spend money that was not his. Not a cent of it. He would find another way.