Chapter 2 - The Trap on the Sixtieth FloorI stood frozen in the center of my Brooklyn loft, my mind reeling as the terrifying truth crashed over my soul like a tidal wave of ice.
For thirty-two days, I had lived in a small, quiet apartment, nursing a broken heart, believing that the man I had loved for fourteen years had traded our sacred vows for a younger, ambitious woman in a luxury penthouse.
Instead, my husband—the Don of New York—had been walking a razor's edge between a federal assassination plot and a rival syndicate war, deliberately acting the role of an unfaithful husband to draw every sniper rifle, wiretap, and federal lens away from my chest.
"And that night?" I asked, my voice trembling as tears finally spilled over my eyelashes. "At twelve forty-three A.M. when she kissed you?"
Julian closed his eyes, a dark, agonizing groan of self-hatred tearing from his throat as he dropped flat onto his knees right on the hardwood floorboards before me.
"She knew you were in the elevator, Amelia," Julian wept, his broad hands reaching out to hover inches from my ankles, terrified to touch me without my permission. "Lena's team monitored our driver's phone. She staged that kiss the exact second you reached the sixty-first floor because she wanted you to leave me! She knew that if you walked away and removed your ring, my focus would shatter, my council would doubt my authority, and Moretti could strike my terminals without my guards surrounding you!"
I looked down at the feared Don of Chicago weeping flat on my floorboards, his posture completely broken, his soul laid bare before me.
"Why didn't you tell me, Julian?" I sobbed, dropping to my knees beside him, my hands reaching out to frame his stubbled jawline, lifting his face to meet mine. "Fourteen years... why didn't you trust me?!"
"Because if you knew, Amelia," Julian whispered, his hands coming up to fiercely, reverently cup my face, pressing his forehead against mine as his tears mixed with mine, "your eyes would have held fear when you looked at her. And Lena Ward was a trained federal interrogator. The second she saw fear in your face, she would have realized the cover was blown... and she would have ordered the hit on our house that very night."
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He pulled the blood-stained black ledger from his coat, opening the brittle, steel-bound pages before my eyes.
Inside were precise handwriting logs, dates, recorded wiretaps, and federal communications proving that three hours after I had walked away from the penthouse thirty-two days ago, Lena Ward had been arrested by Julian’s internal security detail inside PH-61 while attempting to transmit our estate's tactical security codes to Victor Moretti's hit squad.
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