Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the Frame
The mechanical click of the deadbolt retracting echoed through the apartment like the cocking of an executioner’s rifle.
The brass door handle began to depress, rotating downward with sickening slowness. Outside, the man was already leaning his weight against the wood, expecting the door to swing inward, expecting to find a broken, sobbing woman cowering beneath the dining table, ready to accept whatever terms of domestic surrender he chose to offer.
Rhett Valin did not wait for the door to clear the frame.
He stepped forward, his leather soles making no sound against the runner, closing the distance between the kitchen archway and the entrance threshold in two massive, predatory strides. He positioned his towering, broad-shouldered frame directly in front of the door, completely obscuring the interior of the apartment, casting an immense, suffocating shadow across the narrow hallway.
Before the door could open wider than four inches, Rhett turned his head over his shoulder.
His dark eyes, burning with a lethal, unholy fire, locked onto Isa where she lay huddled in the corner of the kitchen.
“Why didn't you tell me,” Rhett said, his gravelly voice dropping into a register so low, so terrifyingly calm that it made the hair on the back of Isa’s neck stand straight up, “that Julian Cross was your husband?”
Isa stopped breathing.
The room plunged into an absolute, dizzying vacuum. Her mouth parted slightly, her bruised lips slack, her wide brown eyes staring at Rhett with a mixture of sheer, unadulterated disbelief and mounting horror.
Julian Cross.
The name hung between them like a toxic cloud.
Julian Cross was the Vice President of Maritime Logistics for Valin Enterprises. He was Rhett’s chief financial conduit on the Great Lakes, the polished, Harvard-educated executive who managed fifty million dollars of legitimate freight operations while maintaining an immaculate social profile in the affluent suburbs of Lake Forest. Rhett had promoted him twice. Rhett had sat across from him at charity galas. Rhett had trusted him with the commercial arteries of his entire empire.
And for fourteen months, the woman who had scrubbed the marble floors of Rhett’s penthouse was the wife Julian Cross had beaten, hunted, and driven across state lines under a forged identity.
Isa looked at Rhett, her soul laid completely bare in the pale winter light. She saw the lethal recognition in his eyes; she saw the realization that the monster she had run from had been eating dinner at his table.
“You… you know him?” Isa choked out, her voice barely louder than a whisper, her world collapsing in on itself.
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She had thought she was safe in the Valin penthouse because Don Valin was the most terrifying man in the city. She had never dreamed that the fortress she had chosen for her sanctuary was owned by the very man who signed her husband’s paychecks.
Before she could speak another word, the apartment door swung fully open.
