Chapter 3 - The Trap at Pier 14Elias didn't yell. He didn't smash anything.
He simply buttoned his charcoal vest, pulled his dark wool overcoat back over his shoulders, and checked the magazine on his custom Sig Sauer pistol with a precise, chilling calm.
"Stay in the penthouse, Ava," Elias told me as he stood by the front door. "Marco is leaving ten armed men inside the building, and the private elevators are completely locked out from the basement levels. No one comes up here without my personal voice authorization."
"Elias, please," I pleaded, stepping out of the nursery into the foyer, clutching my robe around my waist. "Marcus is desperate. He knows he can't win a direct war against you! He's trying to provoke you into doing something public so the federal authorities will step in!"
Elias stopped near the threshold, turning his head to look at me. The harsh hall lights caught the sharp angles of his cheekbones and the dark, lethal promise in his gray eyes.
"Marcus thinks he's playing chess, Ava," Elias said smoothly. "He thinks burning two supply trucks makes him a player in my city. He's about to find out that he's just a bug crawling across my chessboard."
With that, he stepped out into the private elevator corridor, and the heavy oak doors clicked shut, leaving me alone in the silent, luxurious sanctuary with my daughters.
For the next three hours, sleep was impossible.
I paced the floor of the nursery, holding Lily against my shoulder while Maya slept peacefully in her crib. Every sound of the autumn wind slamming against the glass made me flinch. My mind kept racing back to the three years I had spent married to Marcus.
I remembered the way he would smile at neighborhood gatherings, pretending to be the dutiful, hard-working husband, while privately controlling every dollar I spent, every person I spoke to, and every outfit I wore. I remembered the cold, clinical look in his eyes when the midwife told him the twins were girls—the utter lack of warmth, the disgust that instantly settled over his face before he ordered his men to drag me out into the snow.
He didn't want Maya and Lily because he loved them. He wanted them because, in his sick, twisted mind, losing his wife and children to Elias Vance was the ultimate public humiliation. To Marcus, we weren't human beings; we were trophies that had been stolen from his cabinet.
At 4:45 a.m., my private phone—the one Elias’s staff had provided for me—vibrated on the nightstand.
I rushed over, picking it up. It wasn't Elias. It was an unlisted, local number.
My thumb hovered over the screen. Panic seized my throat, but a sudden, fierce surge of maternal protective instinct made me swipe the green icon and press the receiver to my ear.
"Hello?" I whispered.
"You look very comfortable in his penthouse, Ava," a familiar, raspy voice sneered through the speaker.
My blood ran completely cold. Marcus.
"How did you get this number?" I choked out, my hand tightening over the phone until my knuckles turned white.
"Did you really think Elias Vance could hide you from me forever?" Marcus laughed, a cruel, wet sound that sent chills down my spine. "You think because you're sleeping in his high-rise that you're safe? You're my wife, Ava. Those are my daughters. You belong to me."
"I don't belong to you!" I yelled back, my voice shaking with raw, unbridled fury. "You threw us beneath an overpass! You left us to freeze in the mud! You let your men kick me while I was bleeding!"
"And you survived!" Marcus snapped, his tone shifting into a sharp, vicious roar. "Because you're stubborn! But listen to me carefully, Ava. Elias Vance isn't going to save you. Right now, he's standing at Pier 14 looking at an empty warehouse. I didn't burn those trucks to start a war with him, Ava. I burned them to draw him out of that building."
My heart stopped beating. The air vanished from my lungs.
"What... what did you do?" I gasped out.
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"Check the hallway outside your door, sweetheart," Marcus whispered, his voice dripping with venomous triumph. "Elias left ten men in the building. But money talks, Ava. And two of those guards just accepted fifty thousand dollars each to unlock the private service stairs."
A sharp, heavy BANG echoed from the foyer outside the nursery.
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