Chapter 2 - The Air in the Boutique Turned to IceThe silence in the boutique was absolute.
You could hear the soft, rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner, and the faint, sweet scent of cedarwood suddenly felt suffocating. My hand froze on the polished white oak railing of the reinforced security crib. My fingers were trembling, but I forced them to stay still.
Don't run, my instincts screamed. Running means you're prey. Standing still means you're trapped.
Thirty armed men in tailored charcoal suits stood motionless in a semicircle around the doorway. Their hands hovered over the concealed holsters beneath their jackets. Every single one of them was a hardened professional, trained to kill without hesitation. But none of them dared to move an inch, because Damian Moretti’s eyes were locked entirely on my protruding stomach.
For eleven months, Damian had lived in a waking nightmare. The media whispered about the ruthless mafia king who had lost his young wife in a tragic, fiery explosion. They talked about his cold fury, the way he tore through rival syndicates looking for someone to blame, and how his empire had grown even more terrifyingly bloodthirsty out of sheer grief.
None of them knew the truth.
I had faked my own death. I had paid a desperate, corrupt harbor master to leak forged manifestos of the yacht explosion, slipping into the dark waters of the Pacific in a wetsuit while the vessel burned miles away. I had done it because I discovered what Damian’s inner circle was planning: they wanted to use our unborn child as a pawn, a future hostage to secure absolute dominance over the syndicate.
A mother will do monstrous things to save her child. I had chosen to become a ghost.
"Isabella," Damian whispered.
The sound of my name on his lips sent a violent shiver down my spine. His voice wasn't filled with the rage I had rehearsed for a thousand sleepless nights. It was cracked. Raw. Disbelieving.
He took a step forward. The thirty bodyguards instantly tensed, their muscles coiling like steel springs.
"Stay back, Damian," I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep it steady. I stepped back, putting the white oak crib between us like a fragile barricade.
Damian stopped. His dark, piercing eyes—eyes that had stared down executioners and rival bosses without a single blink—slowly traveled up from my swollen belly to my face. His breath hitched. The terrifying mafia king looked, for a fraction of a second, completely shattered.
"You're alive," he breathed, taking another slow, agonizing step closer. "My God... you're alive."
"I had to be," I retorted, venom dripping from my words as adrenaline finally overrode my terror. "If I stayed with you, neither of us would have survived the week. And neither would our son."
At the word son, Damian’s expression shifted. The shock vanished, replaced by an intensity so fierce it felt like a physical blow.
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"Our son," he repeated, tasting the words. Then, his jaw clenched, and a dangerous, dark light flashed in his eyes. "You tried to hide my heir from me, Isabella? You let me mourn over an empty ocean for nearly a year... while carrying my flesh and blood?"
Before I could answer, the glass front door of the boutique shattered inward with an ear-splitting explosion.
