Chapter 2 - The Golden Fortress
The Cross estate sat on eight acres along the shores of Lake Michigan in Lake Forest, hidden behind twenty-foot wrought-iron gates, a canopy of weeping willows, and enough surveillance equipment to monitor a small nation.
When the heavy gates rolled back to admit the motorcade, nausea twisted in my gut that had nothing to do with the pregnancy.
I hadn’t seen this house in three weeks. When I had packed two suitcases and called a cab in the dead of night, I swore I would never walk through those massive mahogany double doors again. The house was a masterpiece of cold marble, towering glass, and vaulted ceilings, but to me, it was a mausoleum where our love had slowly withered and died.
The car stopped. Nikolai, Dorian’s head of personal security—a towering Ukrainian with a scar that ran from his ear to his collarbone—opened my door.
“Welcome home, Mrs. Cross,” Nikolai said with a respectful nod.
“Don’t call me that, Nikolai,” I said tiredly, stepping out into the biting February wind.
Before my boots could even touch the slush on the driveway, Dorian was there, scooping an arm around my waist to steady me. I stiffened against him, but he didn’t let go. He walked me up the grand steps, his hand resting firmly over my hip, practically carrying my weight.
Inside, the warmth of the foyer wrapped around us, along with the familiar scent of beeswax and fresh-cut lilies. Elena, the head housekeeper who had been like a mother to me during my first two years here, was standing near the grand staircase with red-rimmed eyes.
“Clara,” Elena gasped, taking a step forward before Dorian raised a single hand. She stopped, bowing her head. “The master suite has been prepared, sir. Just as you asked.”
“Have the kitchen prepare bone broth and ginger tea,” Dorian ordered without breaking stride, ushering me toward the stairs. “No citrus. No dairy. And tell the gatehouse that no one enters without my personal clearance. Not even my brother.”
“Yes, Mr. Cross.”
“Dorian, stop!” I dug my heels into the runner on the fourth step, spinning to face him. He was a step below me, which put our eyes at almost the exact same level—a rare occurrence given his six-foot-three frame. “I am not staying in your room. I am not playing house with you while you bark orders at the staff like I’m a prisoner of war!”
“You are not a prisoner, Clara,” he said, his voice deadly calm.
“Then let me go back to Pilsen!”
“No.”
“Why? Give me one reason that isn't some vague threat about my safety!” I shouted, the dam breaking. Tears finally spilled over my eyelashes, hot and furious. “You spent six months treating me like a ghost! You stopped eating with me. You came home at three in the morning and slept in your study. When I tried to hold your hand, you pulled away like I was poison! If you hated me so much, why didn’t you just say it? Why did you drag it out until I was so broken I had to run away?”
Dorian flinched. For a fraction of a second, the mask of the untouchable Chicago kingpin slipped, revealing the jagged, bleeding wreck beneath. His jaw tightened so hard I heard the grind of his teeth.
“You think I hated you?” he whispered.
“What else was I supposed to think?”
He took the final step, closing the distance between us until his chest was pressed against mine. He reached up, his scarred thumb catching a tear on my cheek and wiping it away with a touch so impossibly tender it made my knees buckle.
“I have never hated you, Clara,” he confessed, his voice thick with a dark, suffocating intensity. “Not for one second of one day. Every time I didn't touch you, it took every shred of restraint I had not to tear you apart. Every night I slept on the couch in my office, I listened to you crying through the wall until my hands bled from gripping the desk.”
My breath hitched. “Then why, Dorian? Why did you do it?”
His hand drifted down from my cheek to the collar of my coat, then slipped inside, his palm flattening over the center of my chest, right over my hammering heart.
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“Because three weeks before I pushed you away, someone put a bullet through the headrest of my car while I was stopped at a red light on Wacker Drive,” he said quietly, the words dropping like lead weights into the quiet house. “And the note left on the chassis didn't have my name on it. It had yours.”
***
