Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the Blueprint
Dominic didn't panic. His jaw simply tightened, a muscle ticking violently beneath his skin. Without breaking eye contact with me, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a heavy, suppressed pistol, checking the magazine with a practiced, chilling click.
"Lock down the entire floor," Dominic ordered, his voice dropping an octave into a tone of absolute command. "Move Isabella to the subterranean safehouse. And bring me the dossier on Clara's mother."
My heart hammered against my ribs, a spike in the heart monitor's rhythm echoing the panic in my chest. My mother. If Victor Costa’s men were hunting me, what stopped them from finding Ellen in her treatment center in Cleveland?
"D-don't..." I managed to croak past the plastic tube, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.
Dominic paused, his hand resting on the door handle. He walked back to the bed, his expression softening by a fraction—not with kindness, but with a fierce, possessive resolve.
"Your mother was moved two hours after you hit the floor," Dominic said quietly. "She’s currently in a secure facility in upstate New York, guarded by four of my best men. Victor Costa will never touch her. But you need to understand something, Clara. Costa isn't trying to kill you because you're a random catering girl who got in the way. He’s trying to kill you because of what your father left behind."
My breath hitched. My father? My father had died of a stroke when I was eight, leaving behind nothing but debt, a rusted Honda civic, and a box of old books.
"My father was an accountant," I whispered, the words scraping my raw throat.
May you like
"Your father," Dominic corrected softly, "was Arthur Vance. The chief forensic auditor for the Costa family syndicate before he tried to steal four hundred million dollars and vanished twelve years ago."
The room seemed to spin. The sterile white walls of the ICU blurred into a dizzying vortex. Arthur Vance wasn't just a tired, broke man who died in a cramped apartment; he was a phantom who had robbed the most ruthless mafia syndicate on the East Coast. And according to Dominic Rossi, I possessed the one thing Victor Costa would burn the city to the ground to recover: the digital encryption key to the hidden accounts.
