Chapter 2 - Eyes of Amber and Slate
For ten agonizing seconds, Dominic Caruso forgot how to breathe.
His muscular frame remained locked in rigid suspension, the papers in his right hand slowly crumpling beneath the unconscious clenching of his calloused fingers. The touch of her tiny hand was warm, soft as crushed velvet, completely foreign against skin that had borne shrapnel scars and knife wounds.
No child had ever entered this room. No child had ever touched his face. In Dominic’s world, intimacy was a vulnerability, and innocence was an extinct currency.
Yet the baby did not pull away. She leaned into the contact, her tiny fingers curling against the corner of his jaw, her thumb brushing innocently against the dark ink climbing his neck. She let out a soft, contented sigh, as if she had finally reached the harbor after a long, exhausting journey.
Slowly, moving with the agonizing, calculated care of a bomb technician defusing a live warhead, Dominic lowered his large hands.
His hands were massive, corded with thick veins and shadowed by black geometric tattoos that reached his knuckles. He slid his palms beneath her tiny armpits, feeling the delicate fragility of her ribs through the soft ruffles of her pink dress. She weighed almost nothing—a fragile wisp of breath and bone that felt absurdly light against his iron strength.
He lifted her off the marble floor.
The baby did not cry. As Dominic hoisted her against his broad, muscular chest, she immediately tucked her chin over his shoulder, curling her small legs against his vest, her tiny hand gripping the lapel of his black suit jacket as though it were an anchor. Her little head nestled into the crook of his neck, her soft brown curls tickling the jagged Latin script inked across his throat.
Dominic’s guarded, terrifying expression fractured.
The ruthless Don of Chicago—a man whose arrival cleared courtrooms and silenced precinct captains—sat frozen in his leather chair, holding an infant against his heart with an awkward, breathtaking tenderness.
He pulled back slightly, turning his body to bring her into the warm, direct illumination of the brass desk lamp. He needed to see her face.
The baby looked back at him, her round, rosy cheeks flushed with the warmth of his body. She offered him a gummy, four-toothed smile of unreserved delight, blinking her wide, long-lashed eyes against the amber glow.
Dominic’s pulse hammered violently against his ribs.
Her eyes were not brown, nor were they blue.
Her irises were a striking, unnatural pale gray—the exact shade of winter slate over Lake Michigan. But around the dark centers of her pupils, like microscopic fractures of captured sunlight, rested delicate, radiating rings of pure golden amber.
The breath caught in Dominic’s throat with the force of an iron bar.
It was a genetic impossibility. A biological signature so vanishingly rare that in a hundred years of municipal medical registries, it had appeared in only one bloodline in the state of Illinois.
Dominic possessed those exact eyes. And so had Julian.
May you like
Julian. His younger brother. The reckless, laughing boy who had carried the light of the family while Dominic carried the shadows. Julian, whose body had been pulled from the burning wreckage of a commercial warehouse eighteen months ago, leaving Dominic alone on the throne of an empty kingdom.
Dominic stared into the baby’s pale-gray and amber irises, his jaw working soundlessly beneath his stubble, feeling the cold foundation of his reality begin to shudder beneath his boots.
