Chapter 2 - The Sound in the Dark
The photograph sat under the amber glow of the heavy brass desk lamp, the edges curled like dry autumn leaves.
Four years. Four long, agonizing years in that miserable, wind-scoured town in Oregon where every shadow had looked like Dominic Vain and every engine idling outside our damp apartment had felt like an executioner’s knock. I had clutched that exact image to my chest during cold nights when the twins were teething and there was barely enough milk in the fridge, believing it was the only piece of my old life I had managed to salvage from the wreckage of my marriage.
Yet here it was. Resting on Dominic's mahogany desk, bearing the faint, crescent-shaped smudge of ink from my own fountain pen.
"How?" My voice came out as a brittle whisper, scraping against a throat that felt suddenly dry as bone. "How do you have this? I packed everything. I cleaned the drawers out before I ran."
Dominic didn't touch the photograph. He didn't gloat, nor did he offer the smug, predatory smile I had spent half a decade dreading in my nightmares. He simply stood on the other side of the massive desk, his broad shoulders cutting a dark, imposing silhouette against the floor-to-ceiling glass wall where the Pacific waves battered the jagged cliffs below.
"You didn't pack everything, Clara," he said, his voice low, steady, and vibrating with an exhaustion that didn't belong to a man who ruled half the shipping ports on the East Coast. "You dropped it when the vase shattered. You were shaking so hard your fingers couldn't hold the weight of a paperclip, let alone a life."
A cold spike of memory pierced the fog of my anger. The vase.
The heavy crystal vase on the side table that I had knocked over with my elbow when my legs had suddenly turned to water at the sight of my husband's hands on my seventeen-year-old sister. The deafening crash that should have brought the entire house down, followed by my blind, frantic scramble to the bedroom, throwing clothes into a suitcase while tears blinded me so completely I couldn't even see the zippers.
I had been so certain. So violently, blindingly certain of what my eyes had fed my brain.
"I saw you," I choked out, my hands gripping the edge of the leather-topped desk so hard my knuckles turned translucent. "Don't you dare rewrite history, Dominic. Your hands were on her waist. She was pinned against that exact piece of mahogany. She was crying out, and you... you looked like a monster caught in a trap."
"She was bleeding out, Clara."
The words dropped into the room like lead weights.
For three seconds, the only sound was the distant, rhythmic thunder of the surf outside. Then a bitter, wet laugh escaped my lips. "Bleeding out? Oh, please. What kind of cinematic lie is that? Is that the excuse you cooked up with her after I vanished? Did Lily coach you on how to play the grieving savior?"
"Look at me," Dominic commanded.
It wasn't a request. It was the absolute, crushing authority of a man who commanded battalions, and instinctively, my eyes snapped up to meet his.
His golden-brown eyes—the exact same eyes that now blinked up at me from the face of my sleeping son upstairs—were entirely devoid of anger. Instead, they held a desolate, heavy grief that made my chest constrict.
"Lily was eighteen at the time, Clara," Dominic said softly, his voice dropping an octave as he walked slowly around the desk, stopping just inches away from me. "She didn't tell you because she was ashamed. She didn't tell you because she knew your protective streak would make you burn your own life down to shield her. But three weeks before you walked into this study, your sweet, innocent little sister walked into a high-stakes poker game run by the O'Connor family downtown to cover a twenty-thousand-dollar debt she racked up buying designer clothes and fake IDs."
My breath hitched. "That's... that's impossible. Lily didn't even know anyone in the syndicate."
"The underworld doesn't check IDs before it ruins a kid," Dominic continued, his gaze never leaving mine. "She lost. They held her. When she couldn't pay, they didn't just break her fingers, Clara—they carved a warning into her ribs with a hunting knife. She crawled to my office building because I was the only man in this city terrifying enough that those animals wouldn't dare chase her across my threshold."
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
"She came to you?" I whispered, the floor dropping out beneath my feet.
"She came to me because she was bleeding onto my lobby floor," Dominic said, his voice tight, the muscle in his jaw ticking once. "When you opened that door, she had just passed out from blood loss. I caught her to keep her from hitting the floor headfirst. I was tearing her blouse open to check the wound and stem the hemorrhage when you walked in."
He paused, letting the crushing weight of the truth settle over my shoulders like a wet woolen blanket.
"And instead of asking a single question," Dominic added quietly, "instead of giving the man you married three years of your life the benefit of a single doubt... you stripped my home of my unborn children and vanished into the fog."
I staggered backward, my hip hitting the edge of the bookshelf. The world felt like a cruel, distorted mirror. All those years of hating him. All those nights spent teaching my boys to lock the deadbolt twice because their father was a monster.
It had all been built on a foundation of blind, terrified assumption.
"Where is she?" I whispered, my voice breaking entirely. "Where is Lily now?"
Dominic's face hardened, the vulnerability vanishing behind a wall of cold, gray steel.
"Lily is safe," he said flatly. "She lives in a house two counties over, with a college degree, a clean record, and a trust fund I set up for her so she would never have to touch dirty money again. She never came looking for you because I told her not to. I wanted you to learn what it felt like to run from ghosts."
Before I could process the sheer, terrifying cruelty of his final words, the heavy oak study door swung open with a soft click.
A tiny figure stood in the doorway, rubbing his sleepy eyes with the back of a small hand. It was Leo, my youngest twin, wearing his dinosaur pajamas, his dark curls sticking up in every direction.
He looked up, blinking against the bright light of the study, and then his gaze landed on Dominic.
May you like
My heart stopped.
Dominic froze. For the first time since I had met him on the streets of Manhattan seven years ago, the great, untouchable mafia king looked entirely, helplessly paralyzed.
