Chapter 1 - "I Watched You Give Birth"
The silence in the ICU room was heavier than the lead aprons I wore in radiology. Dante’s words hung in the sterile air like poison: I had people watching you.
“What did you just say?” I whispered, my voice shaking so hard the nurse’s station outside seemed to blur.
Dante’s hand, bruised and hooked to an IV, twitched across the bed sheet. “Six years ago, when I walked out of your apartment, I knew my uncle’s syndicate was tracking my every move. If they knew I loved a civilian resident doctor, they would have used you to bleed me dry. So I cut the cord. I vanished. But I couldn't leave you unprotected, Claire. I left two guards disguised as building superintendents in your apartment complex.”
A cold horror washed over me. Every late night walking to my car after a twenty-hour shift, every time I sat on my porch crying over a newborn baby girl who didn't have a father—I had been watched.
“You stalked me?” I demanded, tears of rage finally burning my eyes. “You let me raise our daughter alone, believing I wasn't enough for you, while your mob enforcers took notes on my life?”
“I have eighty-four photo envelopes locked in a vault in Zurich, Claire,” Dante said, his voice raw, cracking beneath the weight of six years of buried agony. “I know she took her first steps in a yellow dress. I know she broke her arm on the monkey bars when she was four. I know you stayed up three nights straight when she had the croup. I received reports every single week. But I never… God help me, I never knew she was mine. The guards reported you were raising a niece or a sister’s child because you kept her last name as Callahan.”
Before I could hurl six years of stored venom at his chest, the heart monitor hooked to his monitor began to beep in erratic, jagged spikes.
Not because of his heart.
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The heavy oak doors of the ICU hallway clicked open. The rhythmic, heavy tread of custom-tailored Italian leather shoes echoed down the polished tile. Outside the glass window, the two armed men Dante’s syndicate had posted at his door dropped to the floor without a single sound—red pools expanding beneath their silk ties.
Dante’s eyes snapped to the door, all weakness vanishing in a heartbeat, replaced by the lethal predator Seattle feared. “Claire,” he barked, ripping the oxygen cannula from his nose. “Get behind me. Now.”
