Chapter 4 - Blood in the LedgerDominic didn't fire me, which baffled me more than if he had thrown me out the front gates. Instead, he assigned me to deep-clean his private ground-floor office—a room lined with leather-bound financial ledgers, antique globes, and heavy mahogany furniture.
By three o'clock in the afternoon, the rest of the domestic staff was occupied with a major grocery delivery in the service wing, leaving me alone with my bucket, rags, and a nagging curiosity that was bound to get me killed.
I opened the bottom drawer of Dominic’s massive executive desk, looking for extra microfiber cloths. There were no cloths. Instead, there was a heavy leather ledger stamped with gold lettering: VALE FREIGHT & LOGISTICS - 2024.
Curiosity overrode self-preservation. I flipped open the cover.
The pages weren't filled with standard shipping manifests or restaurant revenue streams. They were coded financial transfers, moving millions of dollars between shell corporations in Zurich, Panama, and a local medical research facility in downtown Chicago called Apex Gen-Tech.
Highlighted in red ink on the final page was a single name that made my blood run cold: Dr. Aris Vance.
Marcus Vance—the police detective who had threatened Dominic in the kitchen that morning—shared a direct financial lineage with the Apex Gen-Tech facility. More terrifyingly, the memo attached to the transfer read: Subject #4 containment protocols and neural suppression trials.
"Fascinating, isn't it?"
I slammed the ledger shut and jumped to my feet. Dominic was standing in the doorway, his broad shoulders blocking the exit. He had removed his suit jacket entirely, his sleeves still rolled up, revealing the full extent of the angry, jagged scars on his forearms.
"You make a terrible spy, Clara," Dominic said quietly, walking toward me with measured, predatory steps. "You don't check the hallway mirrors before you open private drawers."
"Detective Vance isn't just a corrupt cop, is he?" I said, my voice trembling as I backed up against the heavy mahogany desk. "Apex Gen-Tech isn't a medical facility. It's whatever killed Noah's mother—and whatever is happening to your son."
Dominic stopped three feet away from me. For the first time since I had walked through the iron gates, the iron-clad mask of the Chicago mafia boss cracked, revealing a deep, suffocating exhaustion beneath.
"My wife didn't die in a car crash, Clara," Dominic said, his voice dropping to a harsh, gravelly whisper. "She was a lead researcher at Apex. She discovered what they were manufacturing inside those underground warehouses—synthetic neurotoxins designed to manipulate human aggression and obedience. She tried to walk away with the data."
He clenched his fists, the scars on his arms turning stark white.
"They hit her car on the highway with a semi-truck. But before she died at the scene, she managed to inject our son with an experimental neutralizing agent to keep the toxins from fully taking root in his brain. That’s why Noah screams. That’s why he’s paranoid. His mind is a battlefield between what they put in his blood and what his mother gave him to survive."
The bronze horse in my ribs suddenly felt like a minor injury compared to the crushing weight of the truth.
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"And Detective Vance?" I asked, my breath catching in my throat.
"Vance is on their payroll," Dominic replied, his eyes narrowing. "And tonight, knowing that the federal task force is closing in, Vance is coming here to finish what they started two years ago. To harvest my son's blood before the federation raid."
