Chapter 2
“Please,” Elise whispered, tears cutting silent paths down a face gone hollow with months of secrecy. “Please don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry with you.” Damian’s hands rose to frame her face, thumbs brushing the tears away with a gentleness that felt almost foreign coming from him. “But I am about to burn something to the ground.”
His eyes dropped to the toxicology report still trembling in his other hand.
“Who did this to you?”
The story spilled out of her in broken pieces — the vomiting she’d mistaken for morning sickness, the hair coming out in the shower drain, the appointment she’d only booked because she was terrified she was losing the baby. Dr. Weaver’s face when the lab results came back wrong. The panic that followed, quiet and total.
“Why didn’t you come to me the moment you knew?” His voice cracked on the question in a way he clearly hated.
“Because of how it’s happening, Damian.” Elise pulled back just far enough to meet his eyes. “I live in a locked building. I don’t eat out. The only things I drink regularly are the coffee from the private break room upstairs — and the water at this desk.”
His jaw set. That break room sat on the executive floor. Access required a master key. A very short list of names.
“You think it’s someone inside.”
“I don’t think it. I know it.” She opened a drawer and drew out a heavy silver thermos, hands shaking as she held it toward him. “Dr. Weaver tested the residue himself. Thallium. Odorless. Tasteless. The kind of poison that makes a death look like an illness nobody caught in time.”
Damian took it the way a man takes a live grenade.
“I couldn’t risk telling you,” she went on, voice fraying. “Whoever is doing this has your trust, Damian. If you reacted before we knew who, they’d only find a faster way to finish it. That’s why I’ve slept at this desk for four nights — the hallway cameras are the only thing keeping me alive when I’m alone up here.”
Her hand curled protectively over her stomach.
“I was going to disappear. Take the baby somewhere they couldn’t reach either of us.”
The words landed harder than any blade ever had.
She had been planning to vanish — to take his child and run, because she trusted the danger inside his own house more than she trusted him to end it.
“No one is disappearing,” he said, low and final. “I am going to put a bullet through whoever did this myself.”
May you like
He leaned in, every trace of gentleness burned away.
“Give me the name.”
