Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Asheville
Fourteen weeks later, I was hiding in a small mountain town outside Asheville, North Carolina, calling myself Claire Mason and renting a room above an abandoned antiques shop.
Mrs. June Whitaker took cash and asked no questions, which made her exactly the kind of landlord I needed.
Every black SUV made my blood turn cold.
Still, life slowly grew inside me.
At ten weeks, I heard the heartbeat again. At fifteen, I bought tiny yellow socks and hid them beneath my pillow, and at seventeen weeks I stood before a cracked mirror with one hand over my growing belly.
“You will never be an heir to his empire,” I whispered. “You’ll never belong to his war.”
What I didn’t know was that Declan had been tearing Chicago apart looking for me.
He fired men, threatened allies, interrogated enemies, and sent his people through hospitals, bus stations, airports, shelters, and every address connected to my past. The mafia boss who terrified half the city apparently stopped sleeping after I vanished.
Then, on the twenty-sixth day of his search, his security chief Gavin Roarke entered Declan’s office carrying a tablet.
“I found something.”
According to the man who later told me what happened, Declan slowly lifted his eyes.
May you like
“Where is she?”
And hundreds of miles away, as I stood alone inside a tiny grocery store with one hand resting on my unborn child, a black SUV pulled silently against the curb outside.
