THE MAFIA BOSS ASKED WHO HER PLUM DRESS WAS FOR

The ballroom exploded into screams.

Crystal rained from the ceiling.

Damian turned his body into a shield before the second shot cracked through the room.

“Down!” Nico shouted.

Security men surged from every entrance.

Guests dropped beneath tables. Champagne glasses shattered. The string quartet scattered, leaving a cello on its side near the stage.

Damian’s hand closed around Camille’s wrist.

“Stay with me.”

She was pale but steady.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Another shot hit the marble pillar behind them.

Damian pulled her toward the service corridor.

Nico reached them near the kitchen doors with two guards.

“Shooter’s in the east gallery,” he said. “Maybe two.”

“Target?”

“Unknown.”

Damian looked back toward the ballroom.

Lucien Ferraro was gone.

Vivian Blackstone was crouched behind a table with two hotel security officers.

Julian Cross was helping an elderly woman toward cover.

Then Damian saw something on the floor near the dance floor.

A small silver earring.

Camille touched her right ear.

Empty.

“My earring.”

“Leave it.”

“My father gave me those.”

“Camille.”

She looked at his face and stopped arguing.

They moved through the kitchen and into a private elevator used by staff.

The doors shut.

Only then did Damian see the blood.

A thin red line ran from Camille’s left shoulder toward her elbow.

His expression changed so violently that she looked down in surprise.

“It’s glass,” she said quickly. “I think it’s just glass.”

Damian stepped closer.

“Let me see.”

He moved the plum sleeve gently away from the cut.

It was shallow.

Barely two inches.

Still, rage moved across his face like a storm front.

Camille watched him.

“I’m fine.”

“You were shot at.”

“So were you.”

“That is different.”

Her eyebrows rose.

“How?”

Damian had no acceptable answer.

The elevator opened into the underground garage.

A second vehicle waited with the engine running.

Nico pushed them inside.

“Safe house,” Damian ordered.

Camille turned.

“No.”

His eyes narrowed.

“No?”

“My apartment.”

“Absolutely not.”

“My father’s things are there.”

“Which is exactly why you are not going there until I know what just happened.”

“You knew his name.”

The car went very quiet.

Nico looked straight ahead.

Damian did not answer.

Camille’s voice lowered.

“You knew Arthur Rhodes’s name before Vivian said it.”

He had spent his entire adult life learning how not to react.

Camille had spent two years learning every reaction anyway.

“You did,” she whispered.

Damian’s silence was the answer.

She pulled her arm from his hand.

“What was my father doing in your family’s files?”

“Not here.”

“Then where?”

“At the house.”

“I’m not going to one of your houses so you can tell me a carefully edited version of whatever this is.”

Damian leaned toward her.

“You were just standing under a chandelier when someone put two rounds into the wall behind you. You can hate me later.”

Her face changed.

“Later?”

He realized his mistake.

“Camille—”

“You already know I’m going to hate what you tell me.”

No one spoke for the rest of the drive.

The safe house sat behind iron gates in a wooded section outside the city, a stone structure built during Prohibition and renovated until it looked like a luxury estate rather than a fortress.

A doctor met them inside.

Camille allowed her shoulder to be cleaned and bandaged while Damian stood by the fireplace making calls.

The shooter had escaped.

The east gallery camera feed had gone dark ninety seconds before the first shot.

Someone had used a Moretti security override.

That fact changed the temperature in the room.

By midnight, Nico arrived carrying a black leather folder.

Damian knew it immediately.

His father’s file.

PIER NINE.

Camille saw the label.

Her face went still.

“You had that brought here awfully fast.”

Damian dismissed everyone except Nico.

Then he placed the folder on the dining table.

“I found this six years ago after my father died.”

Camille remained standing.

“You were twenty? Twenty-one when my father died?”

“Nineteen.”

“And you remember him?”

“Yes.”

The answer was quiet.

Camille’s breath caught.

Damian opened the folder.

Inside were copies of shipping manifests, dock maps, photographs, and bank records so old the paper had yellowed at the edges.

Then he turned to a page containing a grainy surveillance photograph.

Camille recognized her father instantly.

Arthur Rhodes stood beside Pier Nine wearing a brown work jacket, his hair windblown, one hand holding a briefcase.

Beside him stood Vittorio Moretti.

Damian’s father.

Camille sat down.

“My father told us he worked in freight accounting.”

“He did.”

“For Moretti Shipping?”

“Indirectly. He audited subcontractors.”

She looked at the photograph again.

“What was Pier Nine?”

Damian exchanged a glance with Nico.

Then he removed a ledger sheet from the folder and turned it toward her.

A list of payments ran down the page.

Most were coded.

One was not.

A. RHODES — 2,300,000 — BLUE HARBOR.

Camille stared at the number.

“That isn’t possible.”

“It was never paid to him.”

“Then what is it?”

“A theft.”

“By my father?”

“No.”

Damian’s answer came too quickly, too firmly.

Camille looked at him.

He continued.

“Someone moved money through the Blue Harbor Children’s Foundation using your father’s vendor credentials. Two point three million dollars disappeared over nine months. Your father found it.”

“The foundation?”

Camille’s eyes went toward the dark windows as if she could still see the gala miles away.

“Vivian’s foundation.”

“It was founded by Vivian’s husband and my father together.”

“And Lucien Ferraro?”

“His company handled pier security.”

Her face drained of color.

Damian opened another page.

There was a handwritten note from Vittorio Moretti.

AR says the books are false. S. has access. Keep C. and L. away from the docks until I know who’s compromised.

Camille read it twice.

“What does ‘C.’ mean?”

Damian did not answer immediately.

Her eyes lifted.

“What does C mean?”

“You.”

The room seemed to tilt.

“My father knew your father.”

“Yes.”

“And your father knew me.”

“He knew you existed.”

“How?”

Damian turned another page.

A photograph slid loose.

It showed Camille at seventeen, standing outside a high school auditorium in a blue dress, holding a debate trophy.

Her mother stood beside her.

On the back, in Arthur’s handwriting, were four words.

Camille. Laura. Keep them safe.

Camille stopped breathing.

“My father gave this to yours?”

“I believe so.”

“Why?”

“Because he was afraid.”

The last night Arthur Rhodes was seen alive, Damian explained, he had met Vittorio at Pier Nine. Two days later a warehouse burned near the waterfront. Arthur’s body was identified from dental records.

The police called it an electrical fire.

Vittorio never believed that.

Neither did Damian.

“Why didn’t anyone tell us?” Camille asked.

“My father tried to move your mother and you out of the city. She refused.”

“My mother never said anything.”

“She may not have known everything.”

Camille looked at him.

“And you?”

Damian felt the question before she asked it.

“When did you know who I was?”

Nico looked at the floor.

Damian’s chest tightened.

“The day before I hired you.”

Silence.

Camille stood so quickly the chair scraped backward.

“You knew.”

“I recognized the surname during the background check.”

“You knew exactly whose daughter I was.”

“I confirmed it.”

“And you hired me anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Damian stepped around the table.

“Because three weeks before your interview, someone broke into the storage unit where my father kept private papers. Nothing was taken except a copy of this file.”

Camille stared at him.

“I thought whoever wanted it might come looking for you.”

“So you put me in your office.”

“I put you somewhere I could protect you.”

Her face hardened.

“You put me somewhere you could watch me.”

“At first, yes.”

The words landed like a slap.

Camille’s eyes shone, but her voice remained steady.

“And after?”

Damian did not answer quickly enough.

She laughed once, without humor.

“Of course.”

Damian did not stop there.

“At first I expected you to quit within a month,” he said.

Camille stared. “That is flattering.”

“You argued with me on your third day.”

“You scheduled four meetings on top of each other and blamed the calendar.”

“I was testing you.”

“You were being impossible.”

“Both can be true.”

Against her will, memory pulled at her. She remembered that week: Damian calling at six in the morning, board members arriving without notice, a customs dispute exploding at noon. She had gone home each night furious and returned every morning more determined not to let him defeat her.

“I kept waiting for you to ask about your father,” Damian continued. “You never did.”

“Because I didn’t know there was anything to ask.”

“I know.”

“Did you go through my personal files?”

“Yes.”

“Medical records?”

“No.”

“Bank accounts?”

“Only enough to confirm no unexplained transfers.”

She laughed in disbelief. “That is not reassuring.”

“I’m not asking you to find it reassuring.”

Camille walked to the far end of the table and braced both hands against it.

“How long before you decided I wasn’t connected to whoever stole the file?”

“Two weeks.”

“And you kept me anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

This time he answered immediately.

“Because you were better than the three assistants before you combined.”

The compliment hurt almost as much as the confession.

Damian’s gaze remained on her. “You stopped a board vote I didn’t know was happening. You caught a six-figure accounting error before my CFO did. You told Senator Bell to wait outside because I was eating lunch.”

“He was early.”

“He had never waited outside anyone’s office in his life.”

“He survived.”

Damian’s mouth almost curved.

Then his expression became serious again. “You earned your place. Whatever you think of why I first interviewed you, you earned every day after that.”

Camille wanted to believe him. That was the problem.

Believing him had become easy long before she understood the cost.

“Camille.”

“No. You don’t get to say my name like that right now.”

She walked toward the entry hall.

Damian followed.

“You’re not leaving this house tonight.”

She spun around.

“Watch me.”

“There’s still a shooter out there.”

“Then assign a car. Assign six cars. You’re very good at assigning things.”

Her hand shook as she reached for the plum wrap she had dropped earlier.

Damian lowered his voice.

“I never used what I knew against you.”

“You used what you knew to decide where I was allowed to stand in my own life.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No?”

She looked at him then, really looked at him, and he saw the hurt beneath the anger.

“I spent two years thinking you trusted me because I earned it. I thought I mattered here because I was good at my job. Now I find out I was a name in a dead man’s folder.”

“That is not what you are to me.”

The words came out harsher than he intended.

Camille’s eyes flickered.

“Then what am I?”

Damian stood six feet away from the woman he had just admitted jealousy over, the woman he had nearly kissed on a dance floor, the woman whose blood on a plum sleeve had made him want to tear apart the city.

He could have told her.

Instead the lights went out.

Every lamp in the house died at once.

Nico drew his weapon.

Damian crossed the space between them and pulled Camille behind him.

Then, from somewhere beyond the dark windows, a red laser sight appeared on the wall.