Chapter 2 - The Shadows of Asheville
The glass doors of the small grocery store slid open with a soft, rusted squeal, letting in a draft of chilly Appalachian mountain air. Outside, rain tapped softly against the asphalt, but inside, my world slammed to a complete, absolute halt.
The black Lincoln Navigator didn't park in a designated space. It stopped diagonally across the front entrance, blocking the exit entirely. Two secondary SUVs pulled up behind it, their dark tinted windows reflecting the yellow fluorescent lights of the parking lot like polished obsidian.
My heart didn't just race; it hammered against my ribs so hard I felt sick. My left hand pressed flat against my bump—now distinct beneath my oversized sweater at seventeen weeks—while my right hand clutched a plastic bag containing a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread.
He found me.
I backed away slowly, my sneakers squeaking against the polished linoleum floor. I retreated down aisle three, past cans of soup and boxed cereals, looking frantically for a back door.
The front doors slid open again.
I expected heavy boots. I expected armed men bursting in with weapons drawn, sweeping the small store like a war zone. Instead, there was only a quiet, heavy silence, followed by the slow, measured tread of a single pair of expensive leather shoes.
He walked past the end of the aisle.
Declan Voss had not slept in twenty-six days.
That was the first thing I noticed. The man who stood before me was not the immaculate, invincible syndicate king of Chicago. His tailored charcoal wool coat was slightly unbuttoned, his dark hair was unruly, and deep, dark shadows bruised the skin beneath his striking grey eyes. He looked thinner, harsher, like a blade that had been ground down to a lethal, desperate edge.
Behind him stood Gavin Roarke, his chief of security, along with two guards who posted themselves at the front doors, quietly flipping the "Open" sign to "Closed" and locking the glass.
The grocery clerk, a young boy no older than eighteen, froze behind the register. Gavin walked over, placed a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills on the counter, and whispered something in a low voice that made the teenager grab his jacket and scurry out the back door without looking back.
I was completely alone with him.
Declan turned his head slowly, his grey eyes locking onto mine.
The air rushed out of my lungs. For four months, I had trained myself to remember him as a monster who dismissed me as a "civilian" to be "resolved quietly." But seeing him standing there, his chest heaving under his coat as his gaze dropped from my face down to my hands... and then to my stomach... the lie shattered.
His eyes widened. His jaw worked silently, his sharp throat bobbing as he swallowed hard.
“Amelia,” he rasped.
His voice was wrecked. It wasn't the smooth, velvety baritone that used to whisper against my ear in the quiet dark of his high-rise apartment. It was raw, cracked, and trembling with a grief so profound it made my knees shake.
“Don't come near me, Declan,” I whispered, stepping back until my spine hit the shelf behind me. Cans of tomatoes rattled against my back. “I mean it. Stay away from me.”
Declan stopped dead in his tracks, six feet away. He lifted his hands slowly—palms open, completely unarmed, a gesture I had never seen the ruler of the Voss empire make to any living soul.
“I won't touch you,” he breathed, his grey eyes shining with a sudden, devastating moisture. “I swear to God, Amelia, I won't lay a finger on you if you don't want me to. Just... don't run. Please. My heart can't take you running again.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, a tear breaking free and tracing a cold path down my cheek. “You married her. You stood on television with Savannah Calloway. You called me a civilian. You said I’d be resolved quietly.”
“Look at me,” Declan begged, taking one small, agonizingly slow step forward. “Amelia, look at me. Look into my eyes and tell me if you see a man who married anyone.”
I opened my eyes.
He pulled back the left side of his heavy coat. On his hand, where a wedding band should have been if the Calloway alliance had gone through, there was nothing. But pinned to the inside pocket of his coat, right over his heart, was something else.
It was my silver paint scraper. The tiny, beat-up tool I used in my restoration studio that I had left on his nightstand the morning I fled.
“There was no wedding,” Declan said, his voice shaking with a terrifying intensity. “There was no alliance. The day I realized you were gone, I burned every contract I had with Don Calloway. I put a bullet through Savannah’s father’s front gate and told him if his daughter stepped within a mile of my territory again, I’d level their entire family.”
I stared at him, my mind spinning into a vortex of confusion and lingering fear. “I heard you, Declan. I was outside the marble office at Voss Tower! Savannah asked about me, and you said—”
“I said she was a civilian so Calloway’s men wouldn't put a target on your back!” Declan roared softly, his hands clenching into tight fists at his sides. “Savannah’s phone was wiretapped by her father! I knew the moment she walked into my office that Calloway was looking for my vulnerability. If I had said you were my world—if I had said I loved you—Calloway’s hitmen would have snatched you from your studio before nightfall!”
He took two fast steps forward. I flinched, but he didn't grab me.
Instead, the most feared man in Chicago dropped to his knees right there on the linoleum floor of a mountain grocery store.
He knelt in front of me, looking up with dark, tortured eyes, his hands resting lightly on his own knees, refusing to touch me without permission.
“I was setting up a safehouse in Switzerland for you,” Declan whispered, his breath catching in his throat as he looked at my round belly. “I was going to end the war, dismantle Calloway, and bring you out of the country where no one could ever touch us. But you vanished. You burned our baby’s ultrasound in the fireplace... and you left me in the dark.”
A sob ripped from my throat. I clutched my belly harder, the world tilting violently on its axis. “I watched it burn, Declan... I thought you chose them.”
May you like
Declan lifted his face, a single, clear tear slipping down his rugged cheek, cutting through the grime and exhaustion of a month-long hunt.
“I choose you,” Declan swore, his voice resonating like a sacred vow in the quiet room. “In every life, in every world, under every sky... I choose you and our child. Please, Amelia... let me bring you home.”
