Chapter 2
The words slipped out before I could stop them. Vanessa didn't hear the truth. She only heard what her jealousy wanted to hear.
Her face twisted with rage. "You disgusting little liar." She raised her hand again.
I closed my eyes. But the slap never came.
A man's voice sliced through the cemetery. "Touch her again, and your father won't have enough senators in Washington to save you."
I opened my eyes. At the cemetery gate stood a tall man in a black overcoat. He wasn't shouting. He wasn't angry. That made him even more terrifying. Behind him, two black SUVs idled in the fog. Several men stepped out quietly and remained by the vehicles, watching. No one spoke. No one needed to. The entire atmosphere changed the moment he arrived.
Vanessa took a step backward. The color drained from her face.
Everyone in Boston knew the name Damon Cross. People lowered their voices when they said it. He controlled the harbor unions, the exclusive clubs, and the deals that never appeared in newspapers. Politicians smiled beside him for photographs and feared him the second the cameras disappeared. Even powerful men treated Damon Cross carefully, because he never made the same threat twice.
But when I looked at him, I didn't see his empire. I saw his eyes. The same lonely eyes I'd met three months earlier on a freezing winter night when I walked into a quiet bar carrying nothing but grief and heartbreak, the anniversary of my mother's first year gone. A stranger had listened to me that night as if I mattered, had bought me soup instead of a drink, had walked me home and never once asked for anything in return. That stranger was standing in front of me now, and only I knew what four months of quiet, careful phone calls since that night had actually meant.
May you like
My breath caught. Damon crossed the wet grass and stopped beside me, kneeling so he was level with my face, and looked at the blood on my mouth, the mud soaked into my uniform, the trembling hand still covering my stomach. Something dark and terrible moved across his face, controlled but unmistakable, the look of a man deciding exactly how much of his restraint he intended to spend.
Then he slowly rose and turned to Vanessa.
