Vivienne's POV
The black car didn't move.
I stared at it, my phone still lit up in my hand, those three words burning on the screen.
Are you safe?
Unknown number. No name. No explanation.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard. My heart was loud in my ears. I looked between the message and the car and the dark, still water in front of me, and everything in my body was screaming that something was deeply, terribly wrong.
Then, without warning, the black car pulled away. Smooth and quiet, like it had never been there at all.
I sat frozen for a full minute after its taillights disappeared.
Then I locked my doors.
I didn't respond to the text. I didn't call Aria back. I just sat there breathing, telling myself it was nothing — a wrong number, a stranger, a coincidence — until my heartbeat slowed enough to think straight.
It took a long time.
I stayed at the waterfront until the cold crept through the car windows and my legs went stiff. By the time I finally started the engine, it was nearly midnight. The city had gone quiet and dark around me, and I was exhausted in the way that goes all the way to the bone — not just tired, but emptied out.
I picked up my phone one last time before driving, just to give my hands something to do. Aria had called seven times. There were three emails from board members with no subject lines, which meant they were either apologizing or covering themselves. I didn't open them.
I opened the news instead.
The top headline made me go completely still.
HEIRESS FOUND DEAD. POLICE SUSPECT PROFESSIONAL KILLING.
For a second, I thought I'd read it wrong.
I clicked it.
Delilah Crane, 27, Chief Operations Officer of Ashford Holdings, was found dead in her apartment tonight. Police responded to a call at approximately 9 PM. Investigators describe the scene as 'precise and professional,' suggesting the involvement of a trained killer. Authorities believe the murder may be connected to a notorious figure known only as the Ghost—
My phone slipped.
I caught it with both hands, my fingers gone clumsy and cold.
Delilah.
She had been standing in my office this morning calling me a whore. She had smiled at me across the boardroom table six hours ago like she was the most powerful person in the world.
Now she was dead.
My brain refused to process it properly. It kept bouncing off the information like it was too big to fit through the door. Dead. Delilah. Dead.
I scrolled down with shaking hands.
The Ghost. I knew the name the way everyone in Ashford City knew it — whispered, feared, never fully believed in. Like a monster story people told to explain things that had no explanation. Twelve confirmed killings in five years. Zero witnesses. Zero evidence. Zero face.
Nobody had ever seen the Ghost.
Nobody who lived to tell about it, anyway.
The article linked to a press conference video. The police chief, recorded earlier that evening, standing outside Delilah's building. I clicked it without thinking, desperate for something solid to hold onto, some official voice telling me what was real.
The police chief spoke in careful, heavy sentences. Investigation ongoing. No suspects in custody. The public should remain calm.
The camera was moving slowly across the scene while he talked — officers, detectives, journalists, barriers. I watched it without really watching it, my mind still stuck on Delilah is dead, Delilah is dead—
Then the camera panned to the left.
And I stopped breathing.
In the background, half-hidden in the shadow between two police vehicles, a man stood watching the press conference. He wasn't an officer. He wasn't press. He was simply there, perfectly still, the way certain people can be still — not quiet, but controlled. Like a person who chooses every movement and has chosen to make none.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Head tilted at a specific angle, like he was listening to something nobody else could hear.
I knew that angle.
My thumb hit the screen, rewinding the video five seconds. I played it again. Paused it on that figure.
The lighting was bad. He was too far from the camera. But the posture—
The way he carried himself—
"No," I whispered out loud, to nobody.
My hands were shaking so badly the phone vibrated with them. I enlarged the image with two fingers, pushing past the blur and the shadow, trying to see clearly.
The shape of his shoulders. The stillness. That particular, specific tilt of the head that I had sat across a dinner table from twice a week for five years.
"That's—"
I couldn't finish the sentence.
Because finishing it meant something I wasn't ready for. Something that rewrote every memory I had, every quiet dinner, every how was your day, every glimpse of that pale, weak, supposedly dying man in his wheelchair—
My foot hit the accelerator before my mind caught up with my body.
I drove back to the Hawthorne Estate faster than I should have. The gates opened automatically when I pulled up — they always did — and I barely parked properly before I was out of the car, my bag left behind on the seat, my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to get out.
I told myself I was being insane. Grief did things to the mind. Stress did things. Seeing Delilah's name on a death certificate — metaphorically, in a headline — would make anyone start seeing things that weren't there.
I told myself that all the way through the front door and down the hall.
But my feet took me directly to the medical wing. Not to my own room. Not to the kitchen for water or to the sitting room to breathe.
Straight to Dante's suite.
The hallway was wrong.
It took me a second to understand why, and then it hit me — the nurses' station was empty. The chair where someone always sat was vacant. The little lamp they kept on all night was off.
At midnight, the nurses were always here.
Always.
My hand touched Dante's door. It swung open under my fingers.
The wheelchair sat by the window.
Empty.
My eyes moved to the bedroom. The door was open. The room beyond it was dark but not empty — I could feel it, the way you feel a room that has someone in it, a presence, a weight in the air.
I stepped inside.
And the light came on.
Not from the lamp. From the hallway behind me, flooding in as someone else entered the room.
I turned around very slowly.
And my husband looked back at me.
Not from the bed. Not from the wheelchair. Not pale and wrapped in blankets with nurses hovering around him.
He was standing.
In the center of the room. Dressed. Perfectly, completely, devastatingly standing. And he was looking at me with dark eyes that held no weakness in them whatsoever — eyes that were sharp and still and so intensely focused on my face that the air left my lungs in one silent rush.
This was not the man I had been married to for five years.
This man was dangerous.
"Vivienne," he said.
And his voice—
His voice was not weak. Not rasping. Not thin with illness.
It was deep. Smooth. Quiet in the way that powerful things are quiet.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
"You should sit down," Dante said calmly, watching me with those impossible eyes. "You look like you already know."
And the worst part — the part that would keep me awake for the rest of my life—
Was that he was right.