Chapter 2 - The Midnight Scan
The grandfather clock in the downstairs gallery chimed twice. Dominic Carretti was still awake.
The Carretti brownstone was dead silent, save for the muffled rhythm of rain lashing against the floor-to-ceiling bay windows of the private library. Dominic sat behind the expanse of smoked glass that served as his desk, an amber tumbler of twenty-year-old scotch resting untouched beside a leather blotter. The room smelled of old paper, cold leather, and the lingering phantom of gun oil.
On the high-resolution, forty-inch calibrated monitor before him, the final gallery proof from Anton Keller’s afternoon session sat frozen at one hundred percent magnification.
It was an exquisite portrait.
Dominic had requested the print because he liked looking at his wife. In a life characterized by betrayal, logistics, and perpetual vigilance, Clara was the only clean truth he possessed. In the frame, she looked like a sovereign queen—radiant, poised, her auburn hair swept up into an intricate cascade of braids, her eyes bright with what everyone in the room had taken for amusement.
Dominic leaned forward, his elbows resting on the glass, dragging the cursor over the image.
He didn’t know why he felt the itch. It was the same primal, animal intuition that had kept him alive through two street wars and three federal ambushes. Something about the way she had walked up the grand staircase four hours earlier had nagged at him—the subtle drop of her left shoulder, the hitch in her breathing when he had merely touched her fingers.
He clicked the mouse. The image zoomed to four hundred percent.
He tracked down from her throat, across the emerald pendant resting in the hollow of her collarbone, to where her left hand rested against his charcoal lapel.
Dominic’s eyes narrowed into slits.
Anton Keller shot with an eighty-megapixel medium-format digital back, capturing detail down to the microscopic weave of the silk. Dominic zoomed in again. Six hundred percent.
The fabric of the ivory opera glove was smooth across the back of Clara’s hand, but as the glove moved past the delicate hinge of the wrist, the drape of the silk altered entirely. It didn’t hug the natural, slender contour of her forearm. Instead, it was stretched taut over a rigid, jagged line—a distinct, chalk-white silhouette pushing violently against the inside of the fabric.
Dominic froze.
He leaned closer to the glass, his jaw tightening until the muscle ticked violently against his skin.
He recognized that silhouette. He had seen it on soldiers, on street enforcers, on men who had taken high-impact trauma. It was the distinct, squared-off shelf of a medical splint.
Dominic zoomed in further, pushing the pixels to their absolute limit. Beneath the pearlescent surface of the glove, near the bottom three buttons, the ivory silk was discolored. A microscopic stain, no larger than a grain of rice, had seeped through the weave.
It wasn't makeup. It was dried, oxidized serous fluid—the telltale leakage of a deep, uncleaned contusion under pressure.
Dominic’s breath caught in his throat.
*“Where are you hurt?”* he had asked her three nights ago in the concrete shadows of the Meridian garage, his hands shaking as he patted down her coat.
*“Nowhere,”* she had insisted, her smile steady, her breath coming in shallow bursts. *“It just glanced off me, Dom. He missed.”*
She had lied to him.
Clara—who could not keep a birthday secret for twenty-four hours, who hated the smell of hospitals, who cried whenever an old stray dog wandered past their estate gates—had stood in front of an open flashbulb with a broken bone, smiling into the camera to keep him calm.
Why?
The answer hit Dominic with the force of an oncoming freight train.
*The treaty.*
For six months, the Commission had been on the razor’s edge of an all-out territorial massacre between the Carretti family and Salvatore Falco’s organization over the northern shipping docks. Dominic had spent months building an architecture for peace. When the hitman ambushed them in the VIP corridor on Tuesday, Leo Navarro had immediately demanded blood: *“They struck at your wife, Dominic! If you don't burn the Falco docks tonight, the other families will see you as a coward!”*
Dominic had hesitated only because Clara had looked him dead in the eye and swore she was untouched. She knew what he would do. She knew that if a single drop of her blood had been spilled on that concrete, Dominic would have personally put a bullet through Salvatore Falco’s forehead before sunrise, regardless of the consequences.
She had broken her body to save his peace.
A profound, suffocating fury flared in Dominic’s chest—not at Clara, but at the world that had forced her to carry that agony alone.
He closed the display with a single tap.
He rose from his leather chair, moving without sound. He didn't turn on the gallery lights as he walked down the long corridor toward the master wing. He moved like a ghost through his own fortress, his pulse thudding a dark, heavy cadence against his eardrums.
He reached the primary bedroom suite and turned the brass handle with infinite care.
The master bedroom was bathed in the pale, icy glow of the city streetlamps through the sheer curtains. Clara was lying on her right side, her body curled inward, wrapped in a heavy charcoal cashmere robe. She was fast asleep, but it was not a peaceful rest; her forehead was furrowed, her lips parted slightly as she let out thin, ragged breaths.
Dominic crossed the thick wool carpet silently, coming to a halt at the edge of the mattress.
Her left arm was resting outside the duvet, elevated on two velvet throw pillows. The silk opera glove was gone. In its place, wrapped tightly from the knuckles of her hand to within two inches of her elbow, was a horrific, uneven mummy-wrap of white medical gauze and rigid fiberglass casting tape, secured with yellowing household elastic bands.
The tips of her fingers were visibly swollen, bluish-pink, and icy to the touch.
Dominic felt something inside his chest fracture. He dropped slowly to his knees beside the bed, lowering his head until his cheek was inches from her hand.
Slowly, carefully, he reached out with one calloused finger and traced the rough, jagged edge of the homemade cast.
Clara flinched in her sleep, a whimper escaping her dry lips. “No… please… Dom, don’t look…”
Dominic stayed frozen, his eyes dark, murderous pools in the half-light.
May you like
“I’m looking, Clara,” he whispered into the dark, his voice shaking with a terrible, quiet grief. “I’m looking, and God help whoever put this on you.”
***
