Chapter 3
Elise didn’t answer right away.
Her fingers stayed pressed to her stomach, to the small, stubborn life curled beneath her ribs, while rain hammered the windows thirty floors above a city that had no idea what was unraveling inside this one glass room.
“If I tell you now,” she said finally, “you’ll kill him before we understand who gave the order. And if he dies too fast, we may never find out who’s really behind this.”
A muscle flexed hard along Damian’s jaw. He had spent a lifetime solving problems by removing them instantly, permanently — that was the whole architecture of the world he ruled. But she wasn’t wrong, and some cold, surviving part of him, the part that had outlasted two assassination attempts and a grand jury, recognized patience for what it was: the more dangerous weapon.
“Then we do this carefully,” he said. “But you are done sleeping at that desk. You will not drink so much as a glass of water in this building that I haven’t watched poured myself.”
“Damian—”
“That isn’t a request.” His voice dropped, stripped raw of its usual command. “I almost lost you tonight and didn’t even know it was happening. I won’t gamble with that math again.”
Her eyes filled again — not with fear this time, but with something closer to relief, the particular relief of a person who has been carrying a weight alone for weeks and finally feels a second pair of hands close around it. She reached for the hand still crushing the toxicology report and laced her fingers through his.
“There’s something else,” she said quietly, before she gave him the name. “In Miami — I never told you, because I didn’t think it mattered. But your sister called me the week before we flew down. She asked whether you’d been, in her words, distracted lately. Whether there was anyone new in your life she should know about.”
Damian went still in a different way now, a colder, more careful stillness.
“You think Vivian knew before you did.”
“I think Vivian has been watching for exactly this for a long time.” Elise’s voice steadied as she said it, as though speaking it aloud finally organized the fear she’d been carrying alone. “I think she’s been waiting for a reason, and I handed her one.”
“His name is Gerald Voss,” she said at last.
Damian went utterly still.
Gerald Voss had belonged to his father before he ever belonged to Damian — head of internal security, keeper of every keycard log, every camera feed, every shipment that crossed the executive floor. Gerald had known Damian since he was a boy memorizing the sound of gunfire through bulletproof glass in the back of his father’s car. Gerald had taught him, at nine years old, how to check a room for exits before he learned how to tie his own shoes properly.
“Gerald,” Damian repeated, testing the name as though it might confess on its own.
“I didn’t want to believe it either.” Elise’s grip tightened. “But the thermos was refilled by someone with a master key. The access log shows only four people on that floor during the hours it happened. You. Me. Gerald. And—”
“And my sister.”
Elise nodded, miserable.
Vivian Cross. Twenty-nine, officially Vice President of Corporate Affairs, unofficially the heir their father had always favored, for one simple, brutal reason — she felt nothing that might slow her down. For a decade Damian had quietly boxed her ambition in with money and titles instead of the throne she believed belonged to her by blood alone. He had told himself, more than once, that keeping her comfortable was the same as keeping her contained.
He had been wrong.
A pregnant secretary carrying the next Cross heir ended every claim Vivian had left to make, and Damian understood, standing there with the thermos cold in his hand, that his sister had known that math far longer than he had.
“She wouldn’t do this with her own hands,” Damian said slowly, the strategist in him surfacing over the fury, the way it always did when the fury became useful only after it had been aimed correctly. “She’s too careful to leave prints. But Gerald has always been loyal to whoever holds power over him — never to whoever holds his affection. She would have known exactly which lever to pull.”
“You think she’s using him.”
“I think,” Damian said, “my sister decided the cleanest way to erase a problem is to let nature take the blame. A miscarriage. A woman who simply got sick and lost a pregnancy no one was supposed to know about in the first place. No body to explain away. No crime scene. Just grief — and silence, and an empire that stays exactly where she believes it belongs.”
Elise’s breath caught audibly in her throat.
May you like
He pulled her out of the chair and into his arms before she could protest, one hand splayed protectively at the small of her back, the other resting over the curve where his child was fighting, against every intention stacked against it, to survive.
“That is not happening,” he said into her hair. “Not to you. Not to either of you.”
