Chapter 1 - The Sanctuary Beneath Lincoln Park
Blood darkened the bottom edge of Mia Carver’s torn coat where it rested against the pale marble floor.
She was asleep.
Not unconscious. Not dead. Asleep from the kind of exhaustion that came only after the body had spent every last reserve convincing itself to survive.
“Don’t wake her,” Marco Bennett whispered.
Gabriel Romano stopped so abruptly that the two men behind him nearly collided with his back. For three hours, nobody in Chicago had dared tell Gabriel Romano what to do. Not his attorneys, not his enforcers, not the private physician waiting at his Gold Coast penthouse, and certainly not his security team.
Yet Marco stood in front of the reinforced safe-room door with a bruise swelling beneath one eye and repeated, “Boss, whatever you do, don’t wake her.”
Gabriel’s hand closed around the front of Marco’s rain-soaked jacket. “My six-month-old nephew disappeared from a motorcade three hours ago. Six men are in the hospital. My sister-in-law is sedated because she thinks her son is dead. And you’re standing between me and that door because somebody is sleeping?”
“You need to see her first,” Marco said quietly.
Gabriel shoved past him, pushing open the heavy steel door.
Inside the dimly lit room, Mia Carver was curled against the corner of a leather sectional beneath a heavy wool blanket. Her brown hair hung in tangled waves over her bruised face. One sleeve of her blouse was ripped open at the shoulder, revealing a dark purple contusion. Her knuckles were scraped raw, and dried rain marked her cheeks like old tears.
Wrapped inside Mia’s ruined coat, pressed securely against her chest, was baby Leo Romano. Alive. Sleeping. Completely unharmed.
Gabriel dropped to one knee beside the couch, the absolute silence of the room pressing into his chest. For eighteen months, since his younger brother Daniel had died in a highway accident, Gabriel had carried an agonizing guilt. Daniel had been the gentle brother, the laughing one who married a schoolteacher and wanted nothing to do with the family’s violent shipping empire. When Leo was born after Daniel’s death, Gabriel had sworn a silent oath to protect the child with his life. Tonight, Damian Sterling’s syndicate had breached that protection—and Mia Carver, a quiet corporate accountant Gabriel had deliberately kept as far from danger as possible, had brought the boy home.
Gabriel touched a trembling finger to Leo’s warm cheek. His vision blurred. He lowered his head, pressing his fist against his mouth to strangle a sob.
“How?” Gabriel finally whispered, his voice dangerously low.
Marco stepped into the doorway. “She was in the third SUV. Downtown audit team needed transportation because of the storm. Sterling’s people hit them beneath the overpass near Wacker. They grabbed the baby, and they grabbed Mia because she was holding him.”
“Where did they take them?”
“An abandoned warehouse near the Indiana line,” Marco explained. “They zip-tied one of her wrists to a cargo rail and left her in a storage room. They forgot to search her boots. Her father was an auto mechanic who taught her lock-picking when she was a teenager. She freed herself, used a canvas document sling to strap Leo to her chest, knocked out a guard with a fire extinguisher, and stole an idling delivery truck.”
Gabriel stared at the sleeping woman in absolute disbelief. “She drove a delivery truck from Indiana?”
“Without a phone, sir. She remembered the address of this inactive brownstone shelter from a three-year-old insurance invoice she audited last spring. She triggered the silent alarm, locked herself in this room, and refused to open the door until I provided her with Daniel’s middle name.”
Gabriel looked down at Mia. The quiet, timid woman who barely looked up from her spreadsheets during quarterly reviews had outmaneuvered Damian Sterling’s deadliest mercenaries.
Slowly, as if feeling his gaze, Mia shifted. Her eyelids fluttered open, her brown eyes unfocused and bloodshot until they landed on Gabriel’s face. Instinctively, her arms tightened around the baby.
“Mr. Romano?” she rasped, her voice dry and ruined.
“I’m here, Mia,” Gabriel said, his voice softer than Marco had ever heard it. “You’re safe. Leo is safe.”
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“They tried to take him,” she whispered, tears cutting clean lines through the dirt on her face. “I couldn’t let them take Daniel’s boy.”
Gabriel reached out, his large, scarred hand gently covering her trembling, scraped knuckles. “No one will ever hurt either of you again. I give you my word.”
