From Bullets To Billions novel Chapter 387

Chapter 387: A Special Contact

Anton’s first stop after being ejected from the Billion Bloodline building was the hospital. He needed his face looked at properly; the pain was worse than the bruise would show, and the cut across his nose had swelled into a purple ridge by the time he arrived. The doctors did a quick assessment and the news came blunt and clinical: his nose was broken and there were signs his jaw had suffered trauma as well. To fix both properly they recommended surgery.

He would need to be placed under, have the bones reset, and then recover with his jaw wired or immobilized, which would mean fluids and nutrients through an IV for a while, a humiliating dependency for a man who always prided himself on being physically self-sufficient.

Cost was not the thing that gnawed at him, not immediately. The idea of having his mouth tied up, of being a shadow of his normal swagger for days or weeks, stoked his anger far more effectively than any bill could. Lying on the hospital bed, looking at the fluorescent light above him, Anton let the fury spike higher. In his mind the whole string of bad luck had been triggered by the red-headed man who’d slapped him out of the building.

The thought reverberated: Stern had done this to him. That one contact, that one encounter, and everything had unspooled.

’That damned Stern,’ Anton thought, jaw aching even as he brooded. ’Nearly all of my trouble started the moment I crossed paths with him. He’s a curse.’ He thought of how the Stern family had supposedly abandoned Max; if the family had no use for him, then maybe Max could be treated like any other unimportant thorn.

The fact that Max was an intern at the Billion Bloodline group didn’t mean much, in Anton’s mind, it was an opportunity. If the Sterns ignored him, Anton could act without worrying about reprisal from that quarter.

But it wasn’t just the humiliation Anton nursed. He simmered at Sheri’s expression when Max walked in the door, the way she looked at Max after the rescue. She didn’t look at him as a savior, as he felt entitled to be; instead she looked relieved and oddly grateful toward the other man.

It rankled. The narrative he’d built in his head was simple and reassuring: he would step in, be the protector, and she would see what a better life with him could be. Now the script had flipped. Sheri’s eyes had said the opposite of what he’d hoped.

’Don’t worry, Sheri,’ he told himself as the hospital bed creaked when he shifted. ’I’ll make this right. I’ll remove him from the picture so you can live the life you deserve. You’ll see what I can give you once he’s out of the way.’

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