Chapter 23
That same morning, while Serenity sat in a sterile hospital room reclaiming her soul from Eleanor Sterling, Evan was discovering the limits of his own.
He woke to the cloying scent of stale leather and expensive floor wax, the olfactory signature of a life he suddenly found repulsive. The sun was an intruder, stabbing through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Leo’s TriBeCa condo with a relentless, blinding light that felt like a personal assault. Evan grunted, the sound vibrating painfully against his teeth as he realized he was sprawled on Leo’s designer sofa, still wearing the wrinkled remnants of yesterday’s pride.
He tried to sit up, but the world tilted violently, as if the floor had suddenly turned to liquid. A massive migraine had taken up permanent residence, a rhythmic
