Chapter 3 - Ghost in the Glass
By the third morning after the shooting, the bruises on my ribs had turned a sickly shade of purple and black, but I insisted on leaving the medical bed. Pain was an old acquaintance; staying horizontal in an unfamiliar room made me feel like an animal waiting for slaughter.
Dominic’s personal physician, a taciturn man named Dr. Harris, had reluctantly cleared me to walk with a cane, under strict orders not to lift anything heavier than a teacup.
I moved into a second-floor guest suite directly across the hall from Dominic’s personal quarters. The room was twice the size of my old studio apartment in Chicago, draped in dove-gray silk and furnished with antique mahogany. But the two armed guards posted at the end of the corridor reminded me that luxury was just another cage.
The door clicked open softly.
I turned around, bracing my shoulder, but my defensive posture melted the moment a small, curly-haired head peeked through the doorframe.
"Mara?" Caleb whispered.
He was wearing his dinosaur pajamas, clutching a battered stuffed bear against his chest. His wide brown eyes looked terrified, as if he expected me to shatter into pieces.
"Hey, buddy," I said, offering him a warm smile despite the tug of pain in my side. "You don't have to whisper."
Caleb darted across the hardwood floor and threw his arms around my knees. He buried his face in my skirt, his tiny shoulders trembling.
"Daddy said you were hurt because of me," he sniffled, his voice muffled. "He said you were brave, but... but there was so much blood, Mara. I thought you died."
A lump formed in my throat. I knelt slowly, ignoring the sharp protest of my cracked rib, and brought myself to his eye level. I smoothed back his unruly dark hair.
"Look at me, Caleb," I said softly. "I didn't get hurt *because* of you. I chose to protect you because you are important. Because you matter. Understand? None of this was your fault."
He stared at me, his lip quivering, before nodding solemnly. "Are you going to go away now? Miss Clara, my last nanny, left after somebody broke the driveway gate."
"I'm not going anywhere right now," I promised, wiping a stray tear from his cheek.
"She isn't leaving at all," Dominic’s voice announced from the open doorway.
Caleb turned around quickly. "Daddy!"
Dominic walked into the room, dressed in an impeccably tailored charcoal suit. The darkness that usually hung around him seemed to soften by a fraction when his eyes fell on his son. He rested a hand on Caleb's head, smoothing his hair before looking down at me.
"Caleb, go down to the kitchen. Mrs. Bell made pancakes," Dominic instructed gently.
"With chocolate chips?"
"With chocolate chips."
Caleb grinned, gave my uninjured knee another quick squeeze, and sprinted down the hall.
Once the sound of his light footsteps faded, Dominic shut the door behind him and locked it. The click of the deadbolt sounded like the cocking of a hammer.
"You shouldn't make promises you can't keep," Dominic said, leaning against the doorframe with folded arms.
"I didn't want him crying," I replied, standing up carefully with the support of the dresser. "And you told him I wasn't leaving."
"Because you're not." Dominic pulled a thick manila folder from under his arm and tossed it onto the coffee table. "My intelligence network worked through the night. It took twelve hours to piece together what you buried under four layers of forged federal documents."
I didn't look at the file. "Then you know."
"I know Julian Vance was your fiancé," Dominic said evenly, though the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. "I know his father ran the Great Lakes distribution network, and your father was his primary logistics supplier. Eight years ago, your father tried to pull out of the syndicate. A week later, Jonathan Cross’s warehouse exploded with him inside."
I gripped the edge of the dresser until my knuckles turned white. The memory of that night—the orange fire roaring against the freezing Chicago skyline, the sound of sirens, the chilling laughter of Julian on my phone telling me I belonged to him now—surged through my mind.
"Julian didn't just kill my father," I said, my voice shaking with cold rage. "He framed me for stealing forty million dollars in bearer bonds from his family's vault. He wanted me hunted. He wanted me cornered with no friends, no money, and nowhere to run, so I'd crawl back to him on my knees."
"You didn't crawl," Dominic observed.
"I shot his right-hand lieutenant in an alley, traded my mother’s diamond necklace for a fake passport, and dropped off the face of the earth." I looked up, meeting Dominic’s gaze squarely. "Julian doesn't let things go. He views people as possessions. When I saw him standing on your ballroom mezzanine, I knew. The shooter wasn't there to assassinate Caleb. The shooter was hired to create a slaughter so Julian could identify me in the chaos."
Dominic stepped closer. His expression was unreadable, but a terrifying stillness had settled over him. "Julian Vance has been trying to establish a foothold in New York harbor for six months. I blocked his shipping permits three weeks ago. He had a reason to hit me. But using my son as bait to draw out his runaway bride?"
Dominic reached out, his gloved fingers tilting my chin up so I had to meet his eyes.
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"Julian Vance made two fatal mistakes," Dominic murmured, his thumb brushing my bottom lip. "First, he aimed a gun at my son. Second... he assumed you were still his."
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