Chapter 2 - The Man at the Window
Lucian did not raise his voice when Norah showed him the photograph.
That frightened her more than anger would have.
He stood in the library beneath the tall brass lamp, studying the picture between his fingers. Gideon waited near the closed doors, his face unreadable. Maya sat beside Norah on the leather sofa, gripping a mug she had forgotten to drink from.
“Who took this?” Lucian asked.
“Ethan.”
His eyes lifted. “Did he touch you?”
“No.”
Lucian’s shoulders lowered by a fraction. “Did he threaten you directly?”
“He said someone has been watching the baby.”
The room became still.
Lucian placed the photograph on the desk instead of tearing it apart. “Gideon, check every camera around Cafe Pernell. I want the route Ethan used, every vehicle near the block, and the source of the photograph.”
“Already moving,” Gideon said.
Norah watched her husband. “He mentioned Pier Nine.”
Lucian’s expression changed so quickly that she might have missed it if she had not spent years learning him. A shadow crossed his face. Not guilt exactly. Recognition.
“What happened there?” she asked.
“A shipment was intercepted.”
“What kind of shipment?”
“Something illegal.”
“That answer covers half your life.”
Lucian came toward her, but she stood before he could reach her. “I am not asking for a sanitized version because I’m pregnant. I’m asking because a man who terrorized me for two years walked into a cafe and told me my dead father’s death is connected to your family.”
His silence was an answer without details.
Maya rose. “I’m going to give you both a minute.”
Norah caught her wrist. “Don’t leave.”
Maya looked from Norah to Lucian and slowly sat back down.
Lucian rubbed his thumb against the edge of the photograph. “Your father worked for my father.”
“I know.”
“He handled accounts for Moretti shipping.”
“I know that too.”
“Three days before he died, he told my father he had found irregularities in the port books. My father sent him to Pier Nine to retrieve a file.”
Norah’s voice dropped. “And then my father died.”
“The file disappeared.”
“Did you kill him?”
Lucian flinched as if she had struck him. It was the first visible wound she had ever given him, and the sight of it did not make her feel better.
“No,” he said. “I was twenty-six. I was not in charge. I arrived after the accident.”
“But you were there.”
“Yes.”
The word settled between them like a locked door.
That night, Lucian moved two guards to the hallway outside their bedroom. Norah argued until her voice went hoarse, then stopped when he quietly told her that one of the men who had breached the estate’s outer system had used an access code assigned to a former Moretti employee.
“Was it Ethan?” she asked.
“We don’t know.”
“You know enough to be afraid.”
Lucian looked at her for a long moment. “I am afraid of losing you every day. I simply don’t let it make my decisions for me.”
Norah wanted to believe him. She wanted to press her face into his chest and let the world remain outside the locked gates. Instead, she placed one hand over the small, invisible life inside her and understood that hiding would no longer protect anyone.
At two in the morning, she woke to the sound of glass breaking.
Lucian was already out of bed. He pushed her behind him as Gideon shouted from the hallway. A dark shape crossed the garden beyond the windows, followed by the sharp crack of a gunshot into the ceiling.
The guards rushed through the room. Lucian pulled Norah toward the bathroom, but she saw something on the nursery wall before the door closed.
A red mark had been painted above the empty crib.
It was a circle split by three lines, the same symbol Norah remembered from the envelope on Ethan’s table.
Gideon returned ten minutes later with a bloodied hand and a folded note.
“The intruder got away,” he said.
Lucian took the note. Norah read it over his shoulder.
One month until the first appointment. After that, the child becomes public property.
Norah’s fingers went cold.
“What first appointment?” she asked.
May you like
Lucian looked toward the locked bathroom, where the pregnancy tests still waited in a sealed bag.
“The appointment you haven’t scheduled yet,” he said.
