36

Louis’s POV

The gala ended in a blur of handshakes and hollow congratulations. We played our parts until the last guest departed, until the final camera flash died. The moment the grand doors closed, the performance dropped like a curtain, leaving backstage wreckage.

Sierra walked upstairs without a word. She didn’t look at me. The space between us, usually filled with heat or understanding, was now a frozen tundra. I followed, my dress shoes loud on the marble in the echoing silence.

She went to the nursery first, as she always did. I lingered in the hallway, watching through the cracked door as she bent over Katie’s sleeping form, her silhouette a study in tenderness. She kissed our daughter’s forehead, her hand lingering on the small, rising and falling chest. She was drawing strength from her, fortifying herself against me.

When she finally emerged, she walked past me as if I were another piece of statuary. She entered our bedroom and went straight to her dressing table, beginning the methodical process of removing her jewelry. The diamonds, which had shone with such defiant brilliance hours before, now looked like cold, hard shackles in the dim light.

“Sierra,” I said, my voice rough.

She didn’t answer. She unhooked her earrings, placed them in the velvet tray, and reached for the clasp of her necklace.

“Talk to me. Please.”

“What would you like me to say, Louis?” Her voice was flat, devoid of the fury or the tears I expected. This was worse. This was exhaustion. This was the sound of a foundation cracking. “Should I ask for more details? Should I ask how loud you laughed when you dared her? Should I imagine what her wordless screams sound like?”

Each question was a knife, expertly placed. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” She finally turned on the stool to look at me. In her simple slip, her face clean of makeup, she looked younger and older all at once. Haunted. “You asked me to stand with you in the dark. I need to know what’s in it.”

“You know what’s in it!” The words burst from me, too loud. I lowered my voice, a desperate plea. “Me. A broken, guilty man who loves you more than he deserves to breathe. Our daughter. A future. That’s what’s in the dark.”

“And her?” Sierra whispered. “Mariella? What’s in the dark for her? A sister who spends her life mourning a ghost? Is that the cost of our future? Because if it is, I’m not sure I can carry it.”

The floor felt like it was tilting. This was the fear that had lived in my gut since the moment I saw her—that her goodness had a limit, a line even her love for me couldn’t cross. I had just led her right up to it.

“I can fix it,” I heard myself say, the words coming from a place of pure, frantic instinct.

A bitter, disbelieving laugh escaped her. “Fix it? How? You can’t un-break her brain. You can’t give her sister her life back.”

“Not that.” I ran a hand through my hair, the plan forming in my mind even as I spoke it, born of desperation and a lifetime of solving problems with force and capital. “The sister. She’s a threat. A living, breathing threat to everything we have. She came here to hurt us. To destroy us.”

Sierra stared at me as if seeing a stranger. “She came here for you to *see* her. To acknowledge what you did. That’s not a threat. That’s a consequence.”

“In our world, it’s the same thing!” I snapped, the pressure exploding. “And consequences left unchecked become catastrophes. What if she goes to Finch? What if she has evidence? A diary? Photographs? She could bring it all down, Sierra. Not just me. The foundation. Your bakery. Katie’s name. Everything.”

I watched the logic hit her, watched the moral outrage in her eyes war with the fierce, primal need to protect our child. I was playing dirty, using Katie as my shield, but I had no other weapons left.

“What are you suggesting?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

The solution was monstrous. It was also the only one that guaranteed silence. “We contain her. We offer a new settlement. A larger, permanent annuity. In exchange for a legally binding non-disclosure agreement and her return to Italy. We make it worth her while to forget she ever came here.”

“And if she says no?” Sierra’s gaze was locked on mine, digging for the truth I hadn’t said.

I didn’t blink. “Then Elias Crowe earns another year’s retainer.”

The silence that followed was absolute. The name of our hired monster hung in the air between us, the ultimate expression of the path we were on. I was offering her a choice: bribe the conscience, or bury it.

Sierra stood up slowly. She walked to the window, looking out at the night, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Minutes ticked by. When she spoke, her voice was drained, resigned to a terrible arithmetic.

“You offer the money. A generous, life-changing amount. You make it clear it’s the only offer. You do not threaten. You do not mention Crowe. You make it a business transaction for her silence. And if she refuses…” She turned, her face pale but composed, a general making a tactical decision. “If she refuses, we let her go. We take our chances with Finch. We do not… eliminate her.”

It was a compromise. A thread of morality she was clinging to. She was trying to build a dam between me and the absolute abyss.

“She won’t refuse,” I said, knowing human nature. Grief was powerful, but money and security were a potent cure. “I’ll have Marcus draw up the papers tomorrow. We’ll have her located by noon.”

Sierra gave a single, stiff nod. The decision was made. We had chosen our fortress over the ghost.

She didn’t come to bed. She took a blanket and pillow and slept on the chaise lounge by the window, a silent, physical manifestation of the new chasm between us.

I lay in the cold expanse of our bed, staring at the ceiling. The image of Mariella’s sister’s face—that deep, weary sadness—was burned onto my eyelids. Sierra thought we were offering money. I knew the truth. We were offering hush money. Blood money, diluted by a decade, but blood all the same.

And I knew, with a cold certainty, that if the sister refused, my promise to Sierra would shatter. I would call Crowe. I would not risk Finch. I would not risk the light in my daughter’s eyes when she looked at me. I had become the man who would kill a ghost to protect a dream.

The cost of Sierra’s love was my soul.

And I was prepared to pay in full.

At dawn, as grey light seeped into the room, I rose. Sierra was asleep on the chaise, her face smoothed of its conscious anguish. She looked innocent. Mine.

I dressed in the gloom and went to my study. The first email I sent was to Marcus, authorizing the finder’s f*e to locate the sister, and instructing our legal team to draft the most ironclad NDA imaginable.

The second email was to the encrypted channel.

**A. Ford. Prepare a contingency assessment. Target: Italian national, female, mid-fifties. Possible Geneva follow-on. Stand by.**

The response was instantaneous.

**Standing by.**

The machinery was in motion. The walls were being reinforced.

And in the quiet of the study, I finally let myself feel the full weight of the monster I had become, and the even heavier weight of the love that demanded it.