Chapter 1
“Carlo will take you.”
“My ankle—”
“Carlo will take you.”
“Vincent, you can’t seriously believe—”
His voice dropped.
“Leave.”
This time she did.
Ten minutes later, Vincent sat alone in the waiting room.
He had spent most of his life making people come to him.
Employees.
Attorneys.
Politicians looking for favors.
Men looking for protection.
Men looking for mercy.
Even enemies eventually came to his table.
Claire had been one of the only people who never behaved impressed by any of it.
When they first met, she had been a trauma nurse working nights.
He had arrived with a cut across his ribs and three armed men around him.
Claire had pointed toward the door.
“They wait outside.”
One of the men laughed.
Vincent hadn’t.
“They stay.”
Claire had looked straight into his eyes.
“Then bleed somewhere else.”
He had sent them outside.
Two years later, he married her.
Claire was soft where Vincent was hard.
Curvy, warm, quick to laugh, impossible to intimidate.
But people often mistook softness for weakness.
Vanessa had.
Vincent sometimes had too.
His phone rang.
Ethan.
“I found something.”
Vincent stood.
“How much?”
A silence.
Then Ethan said, “Enough that you should come back.”
Thirty-seven minutes later, Vincent entered the private office above one of his downtown restaurants.
Ethan Quinn was waiting with a folder.
Vanessa was there too.
Vincent stopped.
“I told you to go home.”
“I did,” she said. “Then Ethan called me.”
Ethan’s face was unreadable.
“I needed her here.”
Vincent walked to the desk.
“What did you find?”
Ethan opened the folder.
“Notification one arrived thirteen months ago.”
He placed a printed page on the desk.
Pregnancy confirmed.
Vincent stared at it.
Claire’s name.
His name.
A confirmation number.
A timestamp.
His jaw tightened.
“I never saw this.”
“No.”
“Who did?”
Ethan looked at Vanessa.
Vincent turned slowly.
Vanessa sighed.
“Oh, please.”
“Who did?”
“I did.”
The words changed the room.
Vanessa lifted her chin.
“It came through the administrative inbox. You were in Milwaukee. Claire had already left. I thought she was trying to manipulate you.”
Vincent picked up the paper.
“She was pregnant.”
“I didn’t know if it was yours.”
The second page landed beside the first.
Ethan said, “Notification two. Three weeks later.”
Twin pregnancy confirmed.
Vincent looked at Vanessa.
She didn’t meet his eyes.
“You saw this too.”
“Yes.”
“You knew there were two.”
“I knew what she claimed.”