Chapter 3 - MY DAUGHTER HAD MY ENEMY’S ATTENTION
By midnight, my home had become a fortress.
It had always looked like one.
Iron gates.
Bullet-resistant glass.
Thirty-two cameras.
Twelve armed men on rotation.
A panic room beneath the library.
But that night, for the first time, I understood how useless walls could become when the enemy already had a bedroom upstairs.
Marco confiscated every employee’s phone.
Nobody liked it.
I did not care.
Diane sat in the breakfast room with two guards while Dr. Harris prepared the suspicious vial for emergency testing at a private laboratory.
Vanessa remained in the east wing.
She had demanded to leave twice.
Both times Marco told her the gates were experiencing a mechanical problem.
She knew he was lying.
We knew she knew.
Nobody bothered pretending otherwise.
Elena sat beside my bed.
Lily slept curled beneath a blanket on the sofa.
My daughter.
The words still did not feel real.
Eight years.
I had lost eight years because I had never bothered to search for the woman who disappeared from my apartment before sunrise.
Back then, Elena had been twenty-three.
I remembered a cheap diner on Halsted Street.
Rain.
Coffee.
Her laughing because I had ordered a steak at four in the morning.
I remembered telling her almost nothing about myself.
She had known I was connected.
Everyone knew.
But I was not boss then.
I was Dominic Romano, the violent second son of a violent family.
By morning, she was gone.
I had convinced myself the night meant less to her than it had to me.
That assumption was now sleeping fifteen feet away.
“Why?” I asked.
Elena looked up.
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”
She was silent for a long time.
“Your brother had been killed two weeks earlier.”
My jaw tightened.
Anthony.
Shot in a restaurant parking lot.
“You were becoming someone I didn’t recognize,” Elena continued. “People were disappearing. Your name was everywhere.”
“I never hurt civilians.”
“You think a pregnant twenty-three-year-old knew your rules?”
That shut me up.
She looked toward Lily.
“I found out six weeks after I left.”
“And you never considered telling me?”
“I considered it every day.”
Her voice cracked for the first time.
“Then Lily was born, and she looked exactly like you.”
I glanced at the sofa.
“She has your eyes.”
“She has your temper.”
“She called me sick-looking within thirty seconds of meeting me.”
“That’s your mouth.”
Despite everything, I smiled.
Elena did not.
“I spent years afraid someone would use her to get to you.”
My smile disappeared.
“And now someone may be doing exactly that.”
Her face changed.
“What do you mean?”
“Vanessa knows Lily matters.”
“You’ve barely spoken to her.”
“She watches everything.”
Elena looked toward the closed bedroom doors.
Three weeks earlier, she had entered my household as a maid.
Three weeks.
The same period during which my condition had deteriorated dramatically.
At first, suspicion came automatically.
Then I hated myself for it.
Elena saw the thought.
“You think I did this.”
“No.”
“You did for a second.”
“I think like a man who stays alive.”
“So do I.”
Fair.
At 1:09 a.m., Marco entered.
“We searched Vanessa’s rooms.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“Her phone?”
“Clean.”
“Too clean?”
His mouth tightened.
“Almost factory clean.”
That meant deleted messages.
Burner phones.
Or someone who knew exactly how much I would search.
“Diane?”
“Still denying everything.”
“Search her apartment.”
“Already happening.”
Marco glanced at Elena, then Lily.
“We found something else.”
“What?”
He placed a manila folder on my lap.
A photograph slid free.
Lily.
Leaving school.
Another photograph.
Lily and Elena outside a grocery store.
A third showed them entering staff housing behind my mansion.
The photographs had been taken from a distance.
My blood turned colder than any fever had managed.
“Where?”
“Vanessa’s desk.”
Elena stood so quickly her chair scraped the floor.
“What?”
I passed her the pictures.
Her hand began trembling.
“No.”
“Were you followed before coming here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Elena.”
“I don’t know!”
Lily moved on the sofa.
We all lowered our voices immediately.
Marco opened the folder further.
“There’s more.”
A report.
No letterhead.
No signature.
Just names, dates, and notes.
ELENA RAMIREZ.
LILY RAMIREZ.
Possible biological relation to D.R.
Verification recommended.
I stared at the page.
Vanessa had suspected.
Maybe before I did.
“Get Lily into the safe room,” I said.
Elena shook her head.
“No.”
“It’s the safest place in the house.”
“I’m not putting my daughter in a concrete box beneath a mafia boss’s library.”
“She is the daughter of a mafia boss.”
The words landed badly.
Elena’s eyes flashed.
“She is Lily.”
I regretted the sentence instantly.
“You’re right.”
That seemed to surprise her.
I lowered my voice.
“But those photographs mean someone has been studying her. If Vanessa is involved in what’s happening to me, Lily may be evidence she never planned for.”
“Evidence of what?”
“An heir.”
Elena stared at me.
I had not planned to say it.
But Chicago families understood blood better than most lawyers understood contracts.
My organization had succession documents.
Trusts.
Voting rights hidden beneath legitimate companies.
If I died unmarried and childless, control of several holding companies transferred temporarily to a board led by my consigliere.
If I married Vanessa first, she gained enormous financial rights.
But a biological child changed everything.
Lily was not merely my daughter.
On paper, she could destroy somebody’s plan.
At 1:34, Dr. Harris called.
Marco put him on speaker.
“I got an emergency preliminary screen.”
I sat straighter.
“And?”
“The medication vial contains a substance that should not be there.”
Elena gripped the chair.
“Poison?”
Dr. Harris chose his words carefully.
“A compound capable of disrupting cardiovascular regulation and body temperature. Repeated exposure could explain almost everything we’ve been seeing.”
My fingers tightened around the phone.
“Could it kill me?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“How long?”
“I can’t give you an exact timeline.”
“You can give me a guess.”
“Days. Maybe less if the dose increased.”
Elena covered her mouth.
Marco’s expression became stone.
I felt strangely calm.
“Can you reverse it?”
“If we stop the exposure and stabilize you, I think so.”
“Think?”
“You hired doctors, not prophets.”
I almost laughed.
Then the clock changed.
2:06 a.m.
Eleven minutes.
My body knew before my mind did.
The first tremor moved through my fingers.
Elena noticed.
“Dominic?”
Another tremor.
Then another.
Dr. Harris swore through the phone.
“Something is already in his system.”
Marco turned toward the IV.
“It was replaced.”
“Food,” I said.
Water.
Medication.
Anything.
My teeth began to chatter.
2:11.
Elena pulled the blankets around me.
“Stay with me.”
The words sounded wrong.
Too much like Vanessa.
But Elena’s face held fear, not certainty.
At 2:14, footsteps sounded in the hall.
Marco reached beneath his jacket.
The door handle turned.
A woman stepped inside.
Not Vanessa.
Diane.
She was crying.
One guard stumbled behind her, holding his bleeding forehead.
Diane raised both hands.
“I’m sorry.”
Marco drew his pistol.
Diane screamed.
“No! Please!”
“What did you give him?” Marco demanded.
“I didn’t know what it was.”
My vision blurred.
2:16.
Diane looked directly at me.
“She said it was medicine.”
“Who?”
Diane sobbed.
“Vanessa.”
Then the clock changed.
2:17.
Pain exploded through my body.
And downstairs, an alarm began screaming.
May you like
The safe-room alarm.
Lily.
