Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the Shadows
The glass of whiskey in my hand remained entirely still, though every nerve ending in my body felt as if it were being flayed alive.
"Say that again," I commanded.
The dining room had been locked down. Heavy iron shutters had descended over every window of the mansion, blocking out the moonlight. Vic stood at the door with his submachine gun slung across his chest, while Leo worked on a military-grade laptop hooked directly into the satellite phone we had seized from Grace’s room.
Grace sat on the floor, her hands tied behind her back with plastic zip-ties. She was no longer crying. The adrenaline of terror had worn off, leaving behind a hollow, exhausted woman whose secrets had been stripped away like dead bark from a tree.
"Dominic Vance came to my apartment in Detroit three years ago," Grace said, her voice dry and rasping. "My husband was one of his low-level drivers. When my husband got caught in a federal sting, Vance had him executed in prison to keep him quiet. He told me that if I ever wanted Amara to reach her third birthday, I would work for him."
"Where is my daughter?" I stepped toward her, the whiskey glass shattering in my grip as my knuckles clenched too hard. Alcohol and amber glass dripped onto the carpet, but I didn't feel the cuts on my palm. "Grace! Where is Maya?!"
"I don't know where she is right now!" Grace screamed back, flinching away from me. "I swear on Amara's life, I don't know the exact location! Vance never told me! He only showed me a live video feed once every six months to prove she was still breathing!"
"Why?" I roared, grabbing her by the collar of her housekeeper’s uniform and pulling her up until her eyes met mine. "Why keep a child alive for two years while letting her father believe he buried her in a closed casket?!"
"Because he needed you broken!" Grace cried out. "He knew that if he just killed you, your captains would step up and fight for your territory. He knew that if he took your empire while you were strong, you would burn the entire Midwest to the ground to destroy him. So he staged the crash. He bribed the medical examiner to seal the coffin before you could see the body. He spent two years watching you drown in grief, waiting for your business connections to weaken, waiting for your guards to become complacent!"
I let go of her collar. She slumped back to the floor.
My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped beast.
Two years.
Two years I had spent sitting in this empty house, drinking myself to sleep, staring at framed pictures of a little girl with bright green eyes and a laughter that used to echo down these halls. Two years I had carried the suffocating guilt that my sins in the underworld had caught up to my innocent daughter.
She wasn't under six feet of dirt in Rosehill Cemetery.
She was somewhere out there. Alive. Scared. Wondering why her father hadn't come to save her.
"Boss," Leo spoke up, his fingers flying across his keyboard. "I just bypassed the encryption on the satellite phone. There's an incoming signal pinging off a tower near the docks in Gary, Indiana. It's scheduled to receive a coded check-in from this device in six minutes."
I wiped the blood and whiskey from my palm onto my trousers. The pain in my hand was nothing compared to the fiery clarity that had suddenly taken over my mind. The grief that had paralyzed me for seven hundred days evaporated, replaced by the lethal, calculating precision that had made me the undisputed king of the city's underworld.
"Grace," I said, my voice dropping an octave into a register that made even Vic shudder. "You are going to answer that phone."
She looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes. "He’ll know it’s a trap, Julian. He’s too smart—"
"You are going to answer that phone," I repeated, kneeling down until my face was inches from hers, "and you are going to tell the man with the scar that you have successfully placed the tracking device inside my home office. You are going to give him the code to the security gate. And then you are going to invite him to come collect his prize."
"And if I refuse?" she whispered.
I looked toward the kitchen doors, where little Amara was likely sitting at the counter, her face covered in chocolate frosting, entirely unaware that her world was hanging by a thread.
"If you refuse," I said coldly, "I will hand you over to my men, and your daughter will spend the rest of her life in an orphanage, wondering why her mother chose a monster over her."
May you like
Grace closed her eyes. A single, bitter tear traced the line of her nose.
"Give me the phone," she said.
