Chapter 5 - The Glass Fortress
The porcelain cup shattered on the oak floorboards.
I hadn't realized I had knocked it over. Hot black coffee pooled around the toes of my boots, dripping through the cracks in the wood, but I couldn't feel the heat.
I couldn't feel anything except the suffocating, crushing weight of four years of lies collapsing onto my head.
“You married her to protect me?” I whispered, my voice sounding distant, like someone speaking from the bottom of an abandoned well.
“I married her to keep her chained, Elena,” Dante rasped, his knuckles white against the edge of the table. “I took the voting control of Carter Logistics away from her on our wedding night. I froze her private accounts. I had four armed enforcers stationed outside her bedroom twenty-four hours a day so she could never reach you.”
He reached across the table, his fingers finally closing around my cold wrist, his touch burning like liquid fire through my skin.
“When you disappeared to Switzerland, I wanted to tear Europe apart to find you,” he wept, pressing his forehead against our joined hands. “Every single night for nearly four years, I sat in that dark mansion, looking at your photograph, telling myself that as long as you were safe across an ocean, my miserable life didn't matter.”
He lifted his head, his gray eyes begging for a shred of mercy.
“And all this time… my boy was growing up without a father,” he whispered. “You were carrying sixty-pound grocery bags up snowy hills in Bern, while I was sleeping in a bed of dry ashes.”
I pulled my wrist back slowly, numbly, staring at the man before me.
The anger that had sustained me for nearly four years—the fierce, unyielding hatred that had fueled my independence—was suddenly replaced by a terrifying, disorienting grief.
He hadn't stopped loving me.
He had sacrificed his freedom, his soul, and his happiness to stand as an invisible shield between me and the sister who had murdered our father.
“Why didn't you tell me, Dante?” I asked, tears finally spilling down my cheeks, hot and unstoppable. “Why did you let me hate you?”
“Because if you knew, you would have come back to fight her,” Dante replied, his voice breaking. “You were twenty-four, Elena. You were gentle, you were pure, you believed the world was fair. Victoria would have had you poisoned before you ever reached a police station.”
He straightened his spine, pulling a clean handkerchief from his pocket and gently dabbing the tears from under my eyes, his touch so reverent, so tender, that my heart fractured down the center.
“Where is Leo now?” he asked softly.
“At the hotel in River North,” I answered, my voice trembling. “With Mia.”
Dante’s eyes hardened instantly, the loving tenderness replaced by the razor-sharp vigilance of an underworld sovereign.
“We need to move him right now,” Dante said, sliding out of the booth and offering me his hand.
“Why?”
“Because Victoria called my private line while I was waiting for you outside the archives,” Dante revealed, his jaw clenched tight. “She knows you’re in Chicago. And she knows Leo is with you.”
A cold terror, sharper and deadlier than any grief, gripped my throat.
“She called me twenty minutes ago,” I gasped, grabbing my purse from the leather seat. “She threatened to call Child Services.”
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Dante reached beneath his suit jacket, checking the slide of a concealed Glock holstered against his ribs.
“Victoria isn't calling Child Services, Elena,” Dante said, his voice dropping into a deadly, gravelly register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “She’s calling the men who sold her the potassium four years ago.”
