Chapter 2 - The Severed Knot
The silence inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross did not break; it shattered.
When Samuel’s knees buckled, the world stopped moving at the speed of human vanity and began moving at the speed of a mother’s panic. I didn’t care about the three hundred aristocrats in their silk lapels and diamond-encrusted collars. I didn’t care about Victor Russo’s cane striking the Italian marble like a gavel sentencing me to death. I only cared about the slack, burning weight of my youngest boy slipping through my trembling fingers.
“May I carry him?” Dominic asked again.
His voice wasn’t the deep, unyielding baritone that had commanded Boston’s private ports for the last seven years. It was cracked down the middle. Raw. Stripped of the Russo armor.
I looked up into the dark eyes that haunted my dreams every night for thirty-six months. In them, I saw no deception—only a terrifying, desperate hunger to touch the flesh of his own blood.
“Take him,” I whispered.
The second Dominic’s massive hands slid beneath Sam’s underarms and scooped him against his chest, a shudder ran through his entire frame. Dominic was broad-shouldered, built like an iron beam wrapped in Savile Row wool, but as he cradled our son, his elbows tucked in, his fingers spread wide across Sam’s fevered back as if he were holding spun glass.
“He’s burning, Maya,” Dominic rasped, his chin brushing the damp curls on Sam’s forehead. “He’s burning up. Jesus Christ, he’s like an open flame.”
“I’ve been rotating acetaminophen and ibuprofen every three hours since dawn,” I said, my voice shaking as I grabbed Lucas’s hand with my left and Noah’s with my right. “His platelets are dropping. The doctor in Providence said if his fever spiked past a hundred and three, the intracranial bleeding risk—”
“Dominic!”
The roar echoed from the altar. Victor Russo had reached the foot of the dais. His face was the color of curdled cream, his eyes twin slits of obsidian malice.
“You will not take another step toward those doors,” Victor commanded, raising his silver-headed cane and leveling it directly at my chest. “You are fifteen minutes away from securing the Avery merger. The media is waiting on the steps. If you walk out of this sanctuary with this common grifter and three bastard children, you destroy everything this family has built since nineteen-fifty.”
The entire front row of the Russo syndicate stiffened. Four men in identical charcoal suits reached into their jackets, their eyes flicking to the patriarch for the execution order.
Dominic didn’t even look at them.
He didn't look at his father. He didn't look at the media photographers who had begun snapping photos from the choir loft, flashbulbs popping like silent explosions against the stained glass.
He looked down at the tiny, limp boy resting against his satin lapel. Sam’s small hand had weakly curled into the silk tie Dominic wore—the silver tie chosen to match Celeste Avery’s gown.
“Call the car,” Dominic said.
The command was soft, but it carried the weight of an executioner’s axe.
Marco, Dominic’s lifelong lieutenant who had stood as his best man, broke rank instantly. He pulled a radio from his waist before Victor could even draw breath to object. “Get the armored Maybach to the side portico. Clear the avenue. Code Black.”
“Marco, stand down!” Victor bellowed, his voice cracking with rage. “Dominic, you are making a fatal mistake!”
Dominic finally turned his head. The look he gave his father was so cold, so devoid of filial affection, that several socialites in the third row physically recoiled.
“The mistake,” Dominic whispered, “was trusting you three years ago when you told me she took eighty million dollars and went to Europe with an Italian count.”
He stepped forward, shielding Sam with his body, and hooked his free arm around my waist, pulling me, Lucas, and Noah into his orbit.
“Dominic, wait.”
The voice was soft, clear, and utterly calm.
It was Celeste.
She had walked down the steps of the altar, holding her silk skirt in one hand so she wouldn’t trip over the hem. Her face was pale, but there was no hysterics in her eyes. No jealous rage. Only the chilling clarity of a woman who had just realized she had almost married into a slaughterhouse.
Dominic stopped. “Celeste. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” she said, her voice carrying across the hushed cathedral. She looked down at Lucas and Noah, who were staring at her ivory dress with wide, terrified eyes, then shifted her gaze to the burning child in Dominic’s arms. “You look at that boy’s eyebrow, Dominic. He has the exact same split hair-line you do. If you stay here to marry me, I will walk out that side door myself and tell the press you’re a coward.”
A collective gasp sucked the air out of the room.
Celeste reached up, unpinned her antique lace veil, and let it drop onto the crimson carpet. She looked Victor dead in the eye. “The merger is dead, Mr. Russo. Deal with your ghosts.”
“Let’s go,” Dominic told me.
He didn’t wait for my answer. He tucked Sam closer to his heart, grabbed my hand, and pulled me through the double doors of the sanctuary. Lucas and Noah had to jog to keep up, their small sneakers squeaking against the polished floor, but Dominic constantly checked his pace, matching his stride to their tiny legs without dropping his speed.
Behind us, Victor’s furious voice was drowned out by the sudden, deafening chorus of a hundred shocked conversations erupting at once.
We burst through the heavy mahogany side doors into the freezing November rain.
A slate-black Mercedes-Maybach pulled up to the curb with screeching tires, followed immediately by two black Cadillac Escalades filled with Dominic’s private security. The rain hit us instantly, cold needles against my skin, but Dominic threw his tuxedo jacket off with one hand and draped it completely over Sam, shielding our son from the storm.
“Get in! Get in now!” Dominic barked, opening the heavy rear door.
I scrambled into the leather interior, hauling Lucas and Noah onto the wide bench seat. Dominic slid in right behind me, Sam cradled tightly against his chest.
Marco jumped into the front passenger seat. “Children’s Hospital is eight minutes out. I’ve called ahead to Dr. Al-Mansoor. The trauma bay is cleared.”
“Six minutes, Marco,” Dominic said, his voice flat, deadly. “Take the transit lane. Anyone who gets in front of the bumper doesn't get to walk home.”
The engine roared, and the heavy armored car surged into the rain-slicked streets of Boston, leaving behind the shattered remnants of an eighty-million-dollar dynasty.
Inside the quiet, climate-controlled cabin, the only sound was Sam’s shallow, raspy breathing.
Noah leaned against my arm, his lip trembling. “Mommy? Is Sam dying?”
“No, baby,” I choked out, wrapping my arm around him and Lucas while trying not to shake. “Sam is just very, very sick. We’re going to the big hospital now. The doctors have better medicine.”
Dominic sat frozen across from us.
His tuxedo shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, his bowtie dangling loose. His hair was plastered to his forehead with rain, and his hands—hands that had signed billion-dollar shipping contracts and, if the rumors were true, pulled triggers on those who crossed his family—were shaking uncontrollably as he held Sam’s small wrist, feeling the frantic, fluttering pulse.
“Maya,” he whispered, not looking up.
“Don’t,” I said, my teeth chattering from adrenaline.
“He has my mother’s nose,” Dominic muttered, his voice breaking into a dry sob that he swallowed immediately. “And your chin. Exactly your chin.”
He looked up at me then. His eyes were bloodshot, swimming with an agony so profound it almost made me forget the three years of hell I had survived alone in a two-bedroom apartment in Providence, scrubbing floors at a community clinic while nursing three babies who cried for a father they had never seen.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Dominic asked, the words tearing out of his throat. “Why the fuck didn’t you come to me before today?”
“I tried, Dominic!” I yelled, not caring that Marco was listening in the front seat. “I went to your headquarters on State Street three times last month! Your head of security told me if I stepped onto the property again, he’d have Child Protective Services take the boys from me for vagrancy! I mailed you three registered packets containing their birth certificates and Sam’s lab work!”
Dominic turned his head toward the front seat with slow, terrifying deliberate speed.
“Marco.”
Marco’s knuckles were white against the dashboard. “Dominic, I swear to God on my mother’s soul, I never saw a single letter. Security logs go directly to your father’s office at the estate. Victor filtered everything.”
A deadly silence fell over the car.
Dominic looked down at Sam again. A single tear escaped his eye, tracing a line down his angular, stubbled cheek before falling onto our son’s burning forehead.
“He told me you hated me,” Dominic whispered. “He showed me bank receipts. He showed me your signature on an offshore account in the Caymans. He said you realized what kind of monster I was and took the eighty million because you wanted a clean life away from the blood.”
“I never spent a dime, Dominic,” I said, holding his gaze with all the venom and exhaustion I had carried for a thousand days. “I worked sixty hours a week. My hands bleed every winter because I couldn't always afford the heating bill. You think I wanted your father’s filthy money? I took that black card because it was the only thing stopping him from putting a bullet in my head the night I told him I was carrying your child.”
Dominic’s jaw clenched so hard I heard the enamel grind. His face transformed into something ancient, terrifying, and utterly devoid of mercy.
“He told you he would kill you?”
“He said,” I whispered, leaning forward so the boys wouldn't hear, “‘A girl from South Boston does not carry the heir to this syndicate. Take the money and erase yourself, or become an unidentified body in the harbor.’ That was your father’s wedding gift to me, Dominic.”
The Maybach screeched to a halt beneath the flashing red and blue lights of the Harbor Children’s Medical Center emergency bay.
The door flew open. A team of four doctors in scrubs and two nurses with a pediatric gurney were already running toward us through the rain.
Dominic didn’t let the nurses take Sam immediately. He stood up out of the car, stepped onto the wet asphalt, and leaned down toward my ear.
May you like
“He will pay for every single cent of that eighty million,” Dominic swore, his voice a low, terrifying vow that shook my soul. “And he will pay for every tear these boys have ever shed. But first, our son is going to live.”
***
