Chapter 2 - The Secret FileTwo days after the wedding, while Clara remained unconscious behind locked doors and armed guards, Dominic sat in the private study of his Manhattan townhouse.
The room was dark, lit only by the green glow of a desk lamp.
In front of him lay a thick, confidential dossier stamped with a private investigator’s seal.
Dominic opened it, his fingers tracing the photograph of Clara’s mother, Ellen, currently in a Cleveland treatment center. Then his eyes dropped to Clara’s employment records, her financial statements, and a series of police reports from six months ago.
He didn't find her by accident at the Aster Crown Hotel.
He had known who she was before she ever stepped foot into that ballroom.
Three weeks earlier, Dominic’s intelligence network had intercepted a series of encrypted communications linking a rival faction of the Costa family to an informant inside the Queens diner where Clara worked. The informant had been skimming records from a shell company—records that accidentally intersected with Clara’s late father, a former forensic accountant who had tried to blow the whistle on Victor Costa’s laundering operations before he was killed in a “car accident.”
Clara didn't know anything about her father’s past. She thought he had died of a heart attack.
She thought she was just an ordinary, exhausted waitress struggling to pay for her mother’s medical care.
But Victor Costa knew. And when Costa realized that Clara’s father had hidden a digital ledger on a microchip disguised as an old silver pendant—a pendant Clara wore every day around her neck—she had become a target long before she ever poured her first glass of champagne.
Dominic had placed his men around her weeks ago, watching her, waiting to see if she would unearth the ledger herself.
Instead, she had walked straight into an assassination attempt meant for his mother, taking seven bullets meant for someone else entirely.
Dominic closed the file, leaning back into his leather chair.
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He had married her to protect her from Costa. But the terrible, twisting irony of it was that Dominic was the one who had brought her into the crosshairs in the first place by letting her live close to his war.
If Clara woke up and discovered the truth—that the man who had put a gold ring on her finger while she was dying was the same man who had been watching her every move—she would never forgive him.
