Chapter 1 - The Watcher in the ShadowsThe sterile hum of the intensive care unit suddenly felt entirely suffocating. I stood frozen beside Dante Moretti’s hospital bed, my fingers digging into the fabric of my scrubs as his confession hung in the air like a physical blow.
"What do you mean, you had people watching me?" I demanded, my voice dropping into a fierce, trembling whisper so as not to alert the armed men standing guard outside the door.
Dante turned his head slowly back toward me, his dark eyes—the exact same shade as Mia’s—filled with a deep, haunting anguish. The oxygen tube resting beneath his nose hissed softly with every shallow breath he took. "I never left Seattle, Claire," he rasped, his voice rough from surgery and trauma. "Not really. On the night I walked out, I made a choice that tore my soul apart. My father’s enemies were circling. They knew about my business, but they didn't know about you. If they had discovered that I loved an ordinary, innocent ER doctor, you would have been used as leverage. You would have been killed."
"So you just decided to play God?" I shot back, the anger bubbling up and hot-wiring every nerve in my body. "You appointed secret watchers to keep tabs on me while I wandered around a city alone, crying over a half-empty coffee mug, wondering if you were dead or just heartless?"
"I had to know you were safe," Dante pleaded, his hand—bruised and wrapped in an IV line—twitching against the sheet as if he wanted to reach out and touch my arm. "Every single week, a trusted man gave me reports. When you walked into the grocery store, when you got your medical license, when you moved into that little house on Maple Street. I watched from the dark because I couldn't bear to be near you, and I couldn't bear to let you go."
"And when I found out I was pregnant?" I asked, my voice cracking. "Did your secret little shadows report that to you? Did they tell you I spent my first trimester sitting on a bathroom floor throwing up and wondering how I was going to raise a child by myself?"
Dante closed his eyes, a fresh tear slipping from beneath his dark lashes and disappearing into the gray hair at his temples. "They told me you were visiting an OB-GYN in October. By then, the syndicate war had reached its boiling point. If I had come back to you then, I would have brought a crossfire straight to your doorstep. I stayed away because I thought—God help me, I thought keeping my distance was the only way to keep you and the baby alive."
May you like
"Well, you failed," I said bitterly, gesturing to the bandages across his chest. "You spent six years hiding in the shadows, building an empire of fear, and you still ended up bleeding out on my trauma table. And worst of all, you missed six years of your daughter's life."
Dante didn't defend himself. He simply looked up at the photograph of Mia still glowing faintly on the lock screen of my phone, which lay resting on the bedside table. "Let me see her, Claire," he whispered, the powerful underworld king reduced to a broken man begging for crumbs. "Please. Just for a minute. Let me see my daughter."
