Chapter 4 - The Mark of the Anchor
Avery did not break her stance immediately. Her instincts, honed across ten years of brutal survival in the forgotten industrial sectors of Chicago and Philadelphia, warned her that a man of Dominic Thorne’s size and reputation was infinitely more dangerous than the socialite lying in the frosting.
Yet there was no violence in Dominic’s posture.
The billionaire stood before her stripped of his armor. His unbuttoned black shirt clung damply to his broad chest, his shoulders heaving with a deep, disorienting shock that looked almost like grief. His dark eyes, which had stared down hostile corporate raiders and syndicate bosses without blinking, were wide, bloodshot, and locked onto the metal around her neck with a desperate, suffocating intensity.
Slowly, deliberately, Avery let her knuckles descend. She unfolded her combat stance, her spine straightening into an unbroken column of quiet dignity. Her heels settled flat onto the marble. She reached up with two fingers—calloused from handling heavy shipping crates and driving commercial transport vans—and closed her hand around the cold silver pendant.
She held his gaze, her hazel eyes completely devoid of fear.
"My father," Avery said.
The two words fell into the grand hall with the weight of an executioner's axe.
A collective murmur rippled through the gallery of guests, hushed and nervous, like the rustling of dry leaves before a fire. Dominic did not hear them. He stood paralyzed, his lips slightly parted, his throat convulsing in an agonizing, dry swallow.
On the floor three feet away, the sound of Avery’s voice seemed to snap Vanessa out of her daze.
The blonde woman struggled onto her hip, using the leg of an antique gilded console table to pull her torso upright. Blood dripped from the corner of her swollen mouth, staining the lace of her plunging dark blue dress, but the physical pain in her jaw was suddenly replaced by something infinitely more acute: cold, creeping, existential terror.
Vanessa’s gaze followed Dominic’s outstretched hand.
She looked at the red silk dress. She looked at Avery’s fingers wrapped around the silver medallion.
When Vanessa’s eyes recognized the crowned falcon and the broken anchor, the last vestige of her aristocratic arrogance disintegrated. Her pupils dilated until her blue irises looked entirely black. Her breath hitched in a sharp, wheezing shriek that she caught behind her teeth, her manicured fingers clawing desperately into the hem of Dominic’s black trousers.
"Dominic... no," Vanessa whimpered, her voice dropping into a frantic, terrified whisper that bounced off the marble walls. "Don't look at it. It's a fake. It's a cheap replica! She’s a thief! She stole it from an estate sale!"
She pulled herself closer to him, her knees dragging through the crushed sugar, her voice climbing into a desperate, panicked crescendo:
"Dominic, call security! Have them drag her out into the woods! Dominic, shut up! Don't say another word!"
Dominic did not look down at the woman clawing at his trousers.
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He didn't move an inch to help her up. His shoes remained rooted to the stone, his eyes locked dead into Avery’s face, reading the undeniable architecture of her jaw, the specific arch of her brow, and the cold, unyielding hazel of her eyes.
A ghost had stepped out of the Hudson storm and into his ballroom.
