Chapter 2 - The Ghost of the Alpine Clinic
The ride inside the bulletproof Maybach was a masterclass in psychological torture, the sleek interior smelling of leather and the oppressive silence of a tomb.
Leah sat wedged tightly between Damian and me, her small head resting heavily against my lap as she finally drifted into an exhausted, tear-stained sleep, her thumb tucked securely into her mouth.
Every time I dared to twitch, Damian's sharp, obsidian gaze snapped to my face, scrutinizing my features as if he were trying to map a constellation of betrayal.
"Your name," he said abruptly, breaking the ten-minute silence that felt like a lifetime.
"Clara," I answered, keeping my voice as steady as humanly possible while my heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. "Clara Monroe."
"Clara Monroe," Damian repeated, tasting the name on his tongue as though he were checking it against a blacklist in his mind. "There is no record of a Clara Monroe working at La Veyra for more than three months. Where were you before that?"
"I moved around," I muttered, staring down at Leah's dark curls. "Boston. Chicago. Working odd jobs. Waiting tables. Trying to forget."
"Forget what?"
"The miscarriage," I snapped back, a sudden surge of defensive adrenaline overriding my terror. "The loss of a child! Do you have any idea what it’s like to carry a life for eight months, to feel her kick against your ribs every night, and then wake up in a white room with strangers telling you she’s gone? No, Mr. Caruso, you're a mafia boss. You take things; you don't lose them."
The moment the words left my mouth, I froze, realizing I had just insulted one of the most dangerous men in the Western Hemisphere.
I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact, waiting for the order to throw me out of the moving vehicle or worse.
Instead, a heavy silence stretched across the back seat.
When I finally dared to open my eyes, Damian was staring at me with an expression so complex it made my breath catch.
It wasn't anger.
It was something far more dangerous: curiosity mixed with a cold, burning hunger for the truth.
"You have spirit," Damian noted softly, his voice dangerously smooth. "Most people start begging for their lives by this point in the conversation. They wet themselves, or they lie. You yelled at me."
"Because I have nothing left to lose," I whispered honestly, gently brushing a stray curl away from Leah's pale forehead. "They took her from me two years ago. Or at least, that's what I was told."
"The clinic in Zurich," Damian said, his tone shifting from interrogation to calculation. "Sanatorium Montreux. Run by a Dr. Heinrich Vance. A private facility catering exclusively to high-net-worth individuals and families with... delicate situations."
My head snapped up. "How do you know that name?"
"Because," Damian said, turning his head to look out the tinted window as the Manhattan skyline blurred past us into the dark silhouette of the bridge, "that is the exact same clinic where my daughter was supposedly born while I was locked in a federal holding facility in Italy on fabricated charges."
The air left my lungs in a single, ragged rush.
"What?"
"My enemies knew I was vulnerable," Damian explained, his voice dropping into a register so cold it felt like liquid nitrogen. "My wife at the time—a woman whose family I was feuding with—was rushed to Sanatorium Montreux for emergency delivery. By the time I was released and made it to Zurich, the child was already dead. Or so Dr. Vance claimed."
I stared at him, the pieces of a grotesque, unimaginably cruel puzzle slowly clicking into place in my mind.
"You... you never saw the body either?"
"They showed me a casket," Damian said, his fist clenching so hard the leather of his glove groaned in protest. "A closed, sealed casket. And Vance produced a death certificate signed by three different Swiss medical boards. I had no leverage. My organization was under siege. I had to bury an empty box."
I looked down at the little girl sleeping peacefully on my lap, her breathing slow and even, her small hand still hooked into the fabric of my cheap uniform shirt.
If Dr. Vance had lied to Damian Caruso...
If Dr. Vance had lied to me...
Then someone in that Swiss clinic hadn't been issuing death certificates.
They had been running a black-market adoption ring for the ultra-wealthy, stealing babies from vulnerable, drugged mothers and selling them—or hiding them—for reasons we couldn't yet fathom.
May you like
"If she's your daughter," I whispered, the terrifying implications washing over me, "and if... God help me... if she's mine..."
"Then someone made a catastrophic miscalculation," Damian finished for me, his dark eyes flashing with a lethal promise of vengeance. "Because they left both of us alive."
