His entire body went still. “Why?”
“She asked me whether your name was attached to anything that could follow her. Paperwork. Entities. Enemies. She didn’t say it directly, but that’s what she meant.” Gia hesitated. “She also said that if you found out, you’d try to fix it. And that fixing it might get you both hurt.”
He closed his eyes. “Us?”
“Yes,” Gia said. “She already knew by then. Or suspected.”
After the call ended, he went straight to his attorney.
The man had represented the Russo empire in ways both legitimate and morally gray for nearly fifteen years, and very little rattled him. Yet when Dominic asked whether any legal or financial structures still connected his name to Evelyn, the attorney’s face paled within twenty minutes.
“There’s a trigger on the divorce confidentiality clause,” the man said, adjusting his glasses with unsteady fingers. “A verification request came through two months ago from a third party.”
Dominic’s voice dropped. “Who?”
The attorney turned the screen.
Harper Lane.
The name landed like a knife pulled from deep storage.
Harper was not a rival boss, not an operative, not someone who played by the loud rules of Dominic’s world. Years earlier, before Evelyn, Harper had been adjacent to his life through a property acquisition and a brief, unwise entanglement that never became love but left behind resentment. She was brilliant, patient, and dangerous in the polished way of people who preferred leverage to violence. If she had resurfaced, then Evelyn had not been imagining things. She had been hiding from someone who knew exactly how to make terror look civilized.
Dominic did not go storming to Evelyn’s apartment. Every nerve in him demanded action, but action of the old kind would only prove her fears correct. Instead he worked silently. He untangled dormant entities, closed legal loopholes, moved assets, and mapped every path through which his name might still cast a shadow long enough to reach her.
Four days later, fate intervened again.
He was leaving a low-profile lunch meeting in River North when he saw Evelyn across the street outside a prenatal clinic. She looked pale and tired, one hand braced against her lower back, a small paper bag clutched in the other. This time, when their eyes met, she did not freeze. She just sighed, as if the city itself had become committed to humiliating both of them.
He crossed only when the light changed.
“You didn’t listen,” she said.
“I did. I didn’t come to you. The city delivered you to me.”
Despite herself, her mouth twitched.
He walked her to the corner. The silence between them was different now, less like a blade and more like a bruise. At the crosswalk he said quietly, “I know about Harper.”
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