Chapter 4 - RED HANDS AND FROZEN SHADOWS
The silence that followed Mia’s confession was heavier than the roar of the vacuum had been.
Duca closed his eyes for a single, agonizing second, drawing in a long breath that expanded his broad chest against his tailored waistcoat. When he opened them, the cold edge in his gaze had turned entirely inward, a grim self-reproach burning through his exhaustion. He looked at the girl's small hands—chapped, red, and swollen from cold water and lemon oil. He looked at her ankles, thin as birch branches beneath the hem of her floral dress. And then he looked at the faded pink sling tied securely with a mother’s careful knot across her narrow shoulder blades, cradle-holding an infant sister who couldn't have been more than six months old.
Throw them out?
Had he become such a monster in the eyes of his staff that a dying mother would send her six-year-old into his private domain rather than ask for help?
Duca took a slow, measured breath and began to peel off his black suit jacket. He tossed the thousand-dollar garment onto the arm of an oxblood leather wingback chair without a second glance. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his white shirt and rolled them up past his elbows, revealing the muscular cords of his forearms and the thick, black ink that trailed down to his wrists.
He was about to kneel—to drop his towering height down to her level, to tell her that no one was being fired, that a doctor was already being dispatched to her mother’s cottage at the rear of the property—when Mia’s entire demeanor abruptly transformed.
She stopped crying. The tremble in her lower lip vanished.
Her head snapped toward the far corner of the study, her wide eyes locking onto the massive, floor-to-ceiling library bookcase that dominated the east wall of the room. The shelves were packed with centuries-old volumes, leather-bound tomes on admiralty law, colonial trade, and ancestral genealogy, unbroken from floor to ceiling.
Mia’s chin lifted. Her small ears seemed to strain against the quiet. The fear of being fired, the exhaustion of the heavy vacuum, the weight of her sleeping sister—all of it seemed to evaporate in an instant, replaced by an eerie, transfixed alertness.
Duca caught the sudden shift. His street-honed instincts, forged in the rougher quarters of Boston before he ever built his empire, flared to life. His eyes followed the line of her gaze toward the dark wood of the shelves.
May you like
The room was motionless. The amber fire crackled gently in the grate. The pendulum of the antique clock ticked steadily.
Yet the child stared at the solid oak bookcase as though she were watching a ghost step out from the wood.
