Chapter 8 - SHADOWS OF THE STERLING HOUSE
Thompson rushed into the alcove with two busboys carrying linen towels, his face pale with corporate panic. "Mr. Sterling! I am so deeply sorry for this disruption! I will have this woman removed from the premises immediately and replaced with—"
"Touch her, Thompson," Adrienne interrupted without turning around, "and I will buy this restaurant by midnight just to tear it down with you inside it."
Thompson froze in his tracks, his mouth hanging open, before backing away into the shadows of the bar with his staff.
Adrienne slowly turned back around and dropped to one knee on the wet marble floor, completely ignoring the sharp glass fragments pressing through his expensive wool trousers. He was now eye-level with the woman in the yellow waitress uniform.
He reached out his hand—his large, calloused fingers trembling slightly—and reached toward her face. He stopped an inch away from her cheek, his dark eyes searching every feature of her face: the shape of her jaw, the slight curve of her brow, and the faint silver scar running along her hairline just above her left temple.
"Two years," Adrienne whispered, his voice thick with an emotion he had kept locked away behind syndicate walls for twenty months. "We buried an empty casket in the family vault."
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The Waitress looked at his reaching hand. She didn't pull away, but her breathing remained fast and shallow. "I don't... I don't know my name," she choked out, tears finally breaking past her lashes and spilling down her cheeks. "I woke up in Saint Jude's two years ago. I couldn't remember anything. I didn't know who I belonged to."
"You belonged to us," Adrienne said softly.
