Chapter 8 - The Midnight Confession
The fieldstone fireplace cast long, flickering tongues of amber across the library floor, but the heat failed to touch the deep, numbing cold inside my chest.
I sat frozen in the leather wingback chair, my hands clutched tightly in my lap to hide the uncontrollable shuddering of my fingers.
"Where is Marcus?" I whispered, my voice sounding hollow, like a transmission from a sinking ship. "If you know all this, you know where my brother is."
Dominic did not answer immediately.
He stepped around the mahogany desk, poured two fingers of amber liquid into a heavy crystal tumbler, and set it down on the small side table beside my elbow.
"Drink it," he ordered softly.
"I don't want liquor, Dominic," I snapped, using his first name for the first time without realizing it. "I want to know if my brother is alive."
Dominic’s expression did not soften, but something behind his dark hazel eyes shifted—a flicker of recognition for the raw, maternal fury that defied his authority.
"Your brother is alive," Dominic said, leaning his hip against the edge of the desk and crossing his arms over his chest. "He is currently held in an off-the-grid safehouse in northern New Jersey, under the supervision of my secondary security team."
"You kidnapped him?"
"I extracted him," Dominic corrected, his tone completely flat. "Two hours before Julian Vane’s men raided the attic apartment in Bridgeport. If my team had arrived fifteen minutes later, Marcus would have been found hanging from a plumbing pipe in the basement."
The image punched the air straight out of my lungs.
I remembered Marcus when he was eight years old, skinning his knees on the concrete playground behind our tenement, crying into my shoulder while our mother worked double shifts at the laundry.
I had promised our mother on her deathbed that I would keep Marcus safe, that I would keep him out of the neighborhood gangs that swallowed up every boy on our block.
And all this time, while I was scrubbing burnt gravy off plates for eight dollars an hour plus tips, Marcus had been swimming with the sharks.
"Why didn't he come to me?" I choked out, a hot tear finally breaking free and running down my cheek. "Why didn't he tell me what he was involved in?"
"Because your brother is an amateur who believed he could outsmart men who have spent three generations operating outside the law," Dominic said coldly. "He took the money because he wanted to buy his way out. He wanted to buy you a house in Connecticut. He wanted to send your daughter to private school."
Dominic reached into his breast pocket, drew out a folded piece of white paper, and dropped it onto my lap.
It was a handwritten ledger page, torn from a spiral notebook, covered in Marcus’s messy, familiar scrawl.
At the top of the page, written in blue ink, were two names: Emma & Mia.
Beneath were columns of numbers detailing offshore bank routing codes, trust fund accounts, and real estate listings in suburban towns I had only ever seen in magazines.
The grand total circled twice at the bottom was exactly twelve million four hundred thousand dollars.
"He didn't spend a single dollar of it, Emma," Dominic murmured, his voice surprisingly devoid of mockery. "The entire sum is sitting in three unassigned blind trusts in the Cayman Islands. He kept the transfer keys inside a digital storage device hidden inside Mia’s plush rabbit."
My heart slammed against my ribs so violently I thought it would shatter the bone.
The gray rabbit.
The battered, chewed-up stuffed animal Mia had carried in her arms since she was two years old.
The toy Dominic had watched her hold while she touched his lapel in Mrs. Gable’s living room.
"You knew," I gasped, looking up at him in sheer terror. "You knew the drive was inside the toy when you carried her into this house!"
"Of course I knew," Dominic said, stepping forward until his polished leather shoes were only inches from my thrift-store sneakers. "Luca’s scanner picked up the encrypted microchip the second we stepped into Mrs. Gable's apartment."
I pushed myself out of the chair, my hands balling into fists, every maternal instinct overriding every ounce of fear I had for the crime boss standing before me.
"Give it back," I whispered, my voice shaking with venomous rage. "You take that money, you leave my daughter alone, and you let us walk out that gate right now!"
Dominic did not move an inch.
He didn't raise his hands.
He simply looked down at me from his towering height, his face an unreadable mask of iron and shadow.
"If I wanted the money, Emma, I would have taken the toy from your child's hands and had my driver drop the two of you at the nearest subway station," he said softly.
The silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the crackle of a pine log splitting in the hearth.
"Then what do you want?" I asked, tears blinding my vision. "Tell me what you want from me!"
Dominic leaned down, bringing his face so close I could feel the heat radiating from his skin, catching the faint scent of rain, cedar, and expensive tobacco.
"I want the Morretti syndicate wiped off the face of this city," Dominic whispered, his eyes gleaming with a terrifying, absolute resolve. "For ten years, they have operated unchecked, trafficking narcotics through the school zones and extorting the small business owners who built this community."
He tapped the folded ledger page in my hand.
"This ledger contains the personal account numbers of the three deputy police commissioners and the federal judge who have protected the Morretti family from prosecution for a decade. Marcus didn't just steal their money; he accidentally stole their entire insurance policy."
"And what does that have to do with me?"
"The Morrettis do not know Marcus gave the ledger to me," Dominic said, his hazel eyes locking onto mine with hypnotic intensity. "They believe the drive is still in your possession. Tomorrow morning, their legal representatives will contact the district attorney's office to offer a trade: Marcus's life in exchange for the missing property."
He reached out, his long fingers gently catching the single tear that had tracked down my cheek, his touch surprisingly soft, almost reverent against my skin.
"I am going to use that trade to draw their entire leadership into a federal trap," Dominic said. "And to do that, Emma, the city must believe that you are no longer just a broke waitress from Rosie's Diner."
"What do you mean?" I stammered, my breath hitching at the unexpected gentleness of his touch.
May you like
Dominic stepped back, adjusting the gold cufflinks at his wrists with cold, aristocratic precision.
"By eight o'clock tomorrow morning, every newspaper in New York will run a front-page announcement," he stated calmly. "Dominic Salvatore has announced his formal engagement to Emma Vance. As my future wife, you will be untouchable under federal law, and any move the Morrettis make against you will be treated as an act of total war."
