Chapter 2 - The Silent House
By noon, the atmosphere inside the corporate fortress had curdled from tension into outright panic.
Two more municipal accounts had frozen. A routine shipment of high-grade steel from Europe had been mysteriously impounded at the port of Montreal. And the mayor’s phone remained stubbornly dead to every number Dominic dialed.
Deciding he needed space to think—or perhaps unconsciously fleeing the closing walls of his office—Dominic left Caleb scrambling through emergency conference calls and drove his matte-black Mercedes back to the penthouse overlooking Lake Michigan.
The apartment was too quiet.
He expected to find Grace sitting in the sunroom, reading a design magazine or painting the nursery walls, surrounded by that serene, aristocratic calmness that had always grounded him.
Instead, the sunroom was empty.
The scent of her perfume—a subtle, clean trace of white tea and rain—was gone, overpowered by the stale reminder of the dress shirt he had carelessly tossed over the chair the night before.
Wait.
Dominic’s eyes darted to the leather chair.
The white dress shirt with the cheap perfume was gone.
He strode quickly down the long hallway toward their master bedroom. The double doors stood wide open. The king-sized bed was made with military precision, the silk sheets pulled taut, reflecting the cold blue light of the afternoon lake.
On the center of the nightstand sat a single item.
His wedding band.
Dominic stared at the gold ring as if it were a venomous snake. It had been resized for him on their wedding day five years ago, custom-engraved on the inside with their initials and the date.
He picked it up. It was cold.
“Grace?” he called out, his voice echoing off the high plaster ceilings.
No answer.
He walked into her walk-in closet. Half of her wardrobe was missing. The designer suitcases—the ones they had used on their honeymoon in Amalfi—were gone from the top shelf. Her jewelry box, left open, displayed empty velvet slots where her diamond tennis bracelets and heirloom pearls used to rest.
Panic, sharp and visceral, finally broke through his arrogance.
He pulled out his phone and dialed her private line.
“The subscriber you have dialed is no longer in service or has been disconnected.”
Dominic slammed his fist against the closet door, splintering the mahogany trim. “Damn it, Grace!” he roared.
He didn't think she was leaving him for good. Women like Grace Whitaker didn't just walk away from empires. She was high-society royalty, a woman whose family name was woven into the very fabric of Chicago’s banking and legal elite—though her father had retired to a quiet estate in Lake Geneva years ago, leaving the family’s public profile deliberately muted.
She was throwing a tantrum. She had found out about the hostess, or she had suspected something, and she had gone to stay at a hotel to make him sweat.
May you like
“She’ll come back,” Dominic muttered to himself, rubbing the back of his neck where the wolf tattoo disappeared beneath his collar. “Once she cools down, she’ll come home.”
He was entirely, catastrophically wrong.
