Chapter 6
Three days later, at ten at night, her phone lit up with a photograph. No message. No name attached. It was Penny — taken through the window of her room at Lakeshore Institute, close enough to see the lines in her hand resting in her lap. The photograph was the message: *We know where your sister is. We got close enough to touch her.
Brielle didn’t panic. She had already passed through and out the other side of panic on that sunlit street. What she felt now was colder, steadier — the anger Mr. Cho had been teaching her to turn into will. She knocked twice on Jude’s study door. He looked up before she even said anything, as if he had been expecting this.
She placed the phone on his desk. “They know about my sister.” Six words. No trembling. No pleading.
Jude looked at the photograph, and his eyes narrowed. He lifted the desk phone. “Vaughn. Lakeshore Institute. Transfer Miss Penny Dawson to Delta facility tonight. Level two protection. Two men inside, two out. Effective immediately.” He hung up and looked at her. “Your sister is under my protection now. No one will touch her.”
“Not with thanks,” Brielle answered, her voice as level as his own. “My mother and my daughter are under my protection. No one will touch them.”
For the first time since she had crossed the threshold of that estate, the look between them balanced — no longer a crime lord and a rescued waitress. Two people, each holding the most precious thing in the other’s life.Jude nodded. Then he did something even Vaughn had rarely witnessed. He opened a drawer, pulled out a file, and turned it toward her — maps, schedules, names, photographs. “Reno Volkov is preparing an attack. Not on a shipment. On this house.” He tapped the estate map. “He’ll draw me out with his main force, then send a second team in for my mother and Maeve.” He told her everything — formation, weak points, counterattack plans. Information no one but Vaughn had ever been given directly.
“When it starts,” he said finally, “I won’t be here. The estate will have the core security team, and you.” He looked at her. “You’re the last line. If the walls are breached, you’re the only one standing between them and my mother, my daughter.” A pause. “You’re the only person I trust not to run.”
Eleven years ago, she had run. And she had carried that wound through every day since. Now the most powerful man in Chicago was placing his mother and daughter in her hands, because he believed she wouldn’t make that mistake twice. He was right. She wouldn’t.
May you like
Later, passing Maeve’s room, Brielle found Jude standing beside his sleeping daughter’s bed in the soft purple glow of a butterfly nightlight. The mask was gone. Only a father, afraid. He didn’t turn around. “If I don’t come back,” he said quietly, “you know what to do.”
Brielle looked at Maeve, curled beneath her blanket, breathing steady. Then at Jude. “You’ll come back,” she said, and meant it more than anything she had ever said in her life.
