Chapter 3

I was seven when my parents died protecting Damian’s father.

Antonio Moretti and his wife brought me into their home. Damian was ten then: quiet with visitors, impatient with his tutors, but endlessly willing to sit beside me when I missed my parents.

For years, he was the safest person I knew.

At nineteen, another family’s son asked me to dance at my birthday ball. Damian shot him through the hand. Afterward, he touched my cheek and told me no one else would ever have me.

I had mistaken that threat for a promise.

When we married, I put the Cole family intelligence network behind him. It gave Damian information he needed to secure his hold on Chicago. We worked late together, passing reports across his desk, arguing over names and routes until morning. I believed we were partners.

Then Claudia arrived.

Three years ago, while I was pregnant with our first child, she claimed I had thrown one of her earrings into the snow. I denied it. Damian ordered me outside to find it anyway.

The blizzard was so fierce I could barely see the house. I searched on my knees with bare hands for four hours. When blood began to stain the snow, I looked up through the windows.

Damian was fastening the missing earring onto Claudia’s ear.

We lost the baby. The doctors warned me I might never conceive again.

I signed divorce papers after that. Antonio and his wife cried and persuaded me to stay. I loved them, and I still wanted to believe the boy who had comforted me after my parents died was somewhere inside the man I had married.

Five months ago, a doctor told me I was pregnant again. I booked an appointment to end the pregnancy and planned to leave Chicago.

Before the appointment, Claudia’s plane went down over the Atlantic.

Damian came to my bedside, knelt, and begged me not to leave him. I canceled the appointment. I burned the divorce papers.

Now I returned from the riding grounds with blood on my face and mud on my clothes. I washed in our bedroom, watching red water circle the drain.

I took a photograph of the cuts on my cheek and hands. Then I photographed the bruise forming across my hip. Damian’s men had arranged the horse; if I survived the next seven days, I wanted a record of what happened here.

I sent the images to a secure Cole archive. The archive required two separate keys to delete anything. Damian possessed neither.

Before I put the phone away, the cleaner called.

“I’ve found the body,” he said. “We can make the dental identification convincing.”

“Who is she?”

“Unidentified. She died before we became involved.”

I shut my eyes. I had insisted that no living stranger be drawn into my escape.

“Send me what you know about her,” I said. “I want her buried under her own name if we ever find it.”