Chapter 4 - The Truth About Eleanor
Dominic read the note without speaking.
His face became impossible to read.
Chloe stood across from him in the private library while Arthur slept upstairs under the care of a nurse.
“Did you let your mother die?” Chloe asked.
Marco shifted uncomfortably near the door.
Dominic looked at Chloe with tired eyes.
“My mother had cancer.”
The answer was quiet.
“She was sick for two years. We had the best doctors money could find. Specialists in New York, Boston, even Switzerland.”
“But Arthur thinks—”
“Arthur thinks many things when he is frightened.”
Chloe held up the note.
“This was planted.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Elliot knows my father’s guilt is the easiest weapon to use.”
Dominic walked to a framed photograph on the bookshelf.
It showed Eleanor Russo standing between two young men: Dominic and Elliot. She was smiling, one arm around each of them.
“Elliot was like a brother to me,” Dominic said. “After my mother got sick, he began telling my father that I cared more about business than family. He told him I was always too busy. Too cold. Too distant.”
“Was that true?”
Dominic looked at her.
“Yes.”
The honesty surprised her.
“I was trying to hold everything together,” he continued. “The company. My father. My mother’s treatment. I thought if I solved every problem, I could stop the world from falling apart.”
He gave a small, bitter laugh.
“But my mother didn’t need a problem solved. She needed her son.”
Chloe’s heart softened.
“One night, she asked me to stay with her,” Dominic said. “I had an emergency meeting. Elliot told me he would sit with her.”
His voice broke slightly.
“She died before I got back.”
Chloe lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“Elliot has spent three years reminding my father that I was not there.”
“And now he is using Arthur’s illness against you.”
“Yes.”
That night, Marco received an anonymous message.
It contained a photograph of Chloe leaving the residence with Arthur earlier that afternoon.
The message read:
THE WAITRESS SHOULD STAY OUT OF FAMILY BUSINESS.
Dominic immediately doubled security.
Chloe was furious.
“I am not a prisoner.”
“You are a target.”
“I did not ask for this.”
“I know.”
“Then stop deciding everything for me.”
Dominic froze.
The words had struck deeper than she intended.
For a long moment, neither spoke.
Then he nodded.
“You’re right.”
It was not an apology wrapped in excuses.
It was simply an apology.
“I’ve spent my life making decisions for people because I thought protection meant control,” he said. “I don’t want to do that to you.”
Chloe crossed her arms.
“What happens now?”
“We find Elliot before he escalates.”
The break came through Gregory Bell.
After being fired from Le Jardin, Gregory had contacted Elliot Vane’s people. He wanted revenge against Dominic and believed Chloe was the easiest way to get it.
He told Elliot Chloe had been sleeping at the Russo residence.
He told him Arthur trusted her.
And he told him something else.
Chloe had seen the restaurant security footage before it disappeared.
Elliot’s men had already tried to erase the footage, but Marco saved a copy.
Gregory agreed to meet Elliot in exchange for money.
Instead, Marco arranged for investigators to monitor the meeting.
At an abandoned warehouse near the river, Gregory finally understood he had made a terrible mistake.
Elliot did not want to pay him.
He wanted to silence him.
Police arrived before Gregory could be harmed, but Elliot escaped through a back exit.
Before disappearing, he left behind a message written in black marker across a warehouse wall:
DOMINIC WILL LOSE THE ONE PERSON HIS FATHER TRUSTS.
Arthur.
The family moved Arthur to a secure medical facility outside the city.
But Chloe could not stop thinking about the note.
Or Eleanor.
Or the look on Dominic’s face when he admitted he had failed his mother.
She began to understand something important.
Power did not mean a person had no wounds.
Sometimes power was the armor people built around the deepest ones.
Then Elliot made his final move.
May you like
He called Chloe directly.
And he said he had Arthur.
