Chapter 1 - THE STITCH DOMINIC REMEMBERED
“Because Friday is payday.”
The answer landed harder than Sarah Carter could have known.
Dominic Russo had been insulted by senators, threatened by men who carried guns under thousand-dollar jackets, and betrayed by people who had kissed his mother’s cheek at Christmas. None of it had ever made him feel quite as useless as those four words.
Because Friday is payday.
Across the room, Lucy shifted again. The sole of her left shoe peeled away from the canvas and made that faint scraping sound against the marble.
Dominic looked at Sarah.
“How much do we pay you?”
Her chin lifted a fraction. “Enough.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“And it isn’t your business how I spend it.”
The words came out calm, but her fingers tightened around Lucy’s hand.
Dominic leaned back in his chair.
Most people remembered who he was before they challenged him. Sarah Carter seemed to remember and do it anyway.
Interesting.
“Your daughter’s shoes don’t fit.”
“I’m aware.”
“You work in a house with four guest bedrooms that nobody enters, a greenhouse that costs more to heat than most people make in a year, and a kitchen that throws away food every night.” His voice lowered. “So yes, Mrs. Carter, I’m beginning to think it is my business.”
For the first time, anger replaced embarrassment in Sarah’s face.
“I don’t need charity.”
“I didn’t offer charity.”
“What do you call it when a rich man sees one thing he doesn’t like and decides he can fix a stranger’s life with his wallet?”
Dominic almost answered.
Then Lucy spoke.
“Mama.”
Sarah looked down immediately.
The little girl was staring at Dominic, not frightened exactly, but alert in the way children became when adults used quiet voices that were more dangerous than shouting.
“It’s okay, baby,” Sarah said.
Lucy raised Mr. Button and pressed the rabbit’s bent ear against her cheek.
“He says the man is mad at the shoes.”
Dominic looked at the rabbit.
“Mr. Button is very observant.”
“He only has one eye.”
“Maybe that helps.”
Lucy considered this with great seriousness.
Then one of the heavy dark stitches along the rabbit’s lower back snapped.
A tiny metal object hit the marble.
The sound was delicate.
Barely more than a click.
Dominic stopped breathing.
Sarah moved first.
She bent quickly, but Dominic was already out of his chair.
He reached the object before she did.
A small brass key lay against his palm.
It was no longer than the top joint of his thumb, old enough that the teeth had gone dark in the grooves. Around the round head, someone had scratched two letters by hand.
E.R.
Dominic stared at them.
The room disappeared.
For one ugly second, he was seventeen again, sitting on the back steps of a house in Queens with his little sister crying beside him because their father had thrown her stuffed rabbit into the trash after she spilled grape juice on an expensive rug.
Elena had been nine.
The rabbit had been gray.
It had had two glass eyes then.
Dominic had climbed into the garbage bin behind the kitchen before sunrise, found the toy under coffee grounds and broken china, washed it in the laundry sink, and repaired a split seam with black upholstery thread because it was the only thread he could find.
His stitches had been too big.
Crooked.
Embarrassingly bad.
Elena had loved them.
She had called the rabbit Mr. Button because one eye fell out two years later and she replaced it with a blue coat button.
Dominic’s gaze lifted slowly to the toy in Lucy’s arms.
The missing eye socket was empty now.
The left ear bent exactly the same way.
The seam along the back was still sewn in dark, clumsy thread.
His thread.
His stitches.
His sister’s rabbit.
Elena Russo had been dead for four years.
Dominic closed his fist around the key.
“Where did you get that?”
Sarah’s face changed.
It was not confusion.
It was fear.
Real fear.
The kind people could not fake.
Dominic saw it and felt something cold move through him.
“Sarah.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“That rabbit.”
Lucy pulled Mr. Button closer to her chest.
Sarah stepped slightly in front of her daughter.
Dominic noticed that too.
He had seen men reach for weapons more slowly than Sarah placed herself between him and the child.
“Where did you get it?” he repeated.
Sarah swallowed.
“It belonged to my husband.”
“Michael Carter?”
“Yes.”
Dominic searched his memory. Carter. Michael. The name meant nothing beyond the background report Bernadette had run when Sarah was hired. Construction electrician. Clean record. Dead three years ago in a highway accident outside Albany.
“How did your husband get my sister’s rabbit?”
Sarah’s eyes widened.
Lucy looked up at her mother.
“Mama?”
Sarah said nothing.
Dominic opened his hand and showed her the key.
“Those initials are Elena Russo.”
Sarah went pale enough that even Lucy noticed.
“Mama, are you cold?”
“No, sweetheart.”
“You look cold.”
Sarah crouched, smoothed Lucy’s hair and forced a smile.
“Go find Miss Bernadette for me.”
Lucy frowned. “I’m not supposed to go alone.”
“Today you can.”
Dominic said, “No.”
Sarah’s head snapped toward him.
His tone softened by a degree.
“She doesn’t leave this room unless you go with her.”
“You don’t get to tell me where my daughter can go.”
“If that rabbit is what I think it is, then somebody hid a key inside it four years ago. If somebody else knows it exists, your daughter walking around alone is the last thing that happens.”
Silence filled the dining room.
Sarah stared at him.
Then, very carefully, she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and took out her phone.
Dominic’s bodyguard appeared in the doorway before she could unlock it.
Nico Valenti had a talent for arriving when tension changed shape. He was thirty-six, broad-shouldered, permanently unimpressed and loyal enough that Dominic trusted him with doors, cars and information no sane person should know.
“You called?” Nico asked.
“I didn’t.”
“You stopped answering.”
“That is not the same thing.”
Nico’s gaze moved to Sarah, Lucy, the rabbit and finally the key in Dominic’s hand.
“Something happened.”
Dominic held up the brass key.
“Lock the estate.”
Sarah stepped forward. “Absolutely not.”
Nico did not move.
Dominic said, “Nobody enters or leaves until I know what this opens.”
“I have a job to finish.”
“You’re finished for today.”
“That isn’t your decision.”
Dominic almost laughed, but there was nothing funny in him.
“This is my house.”
“And she is my child.” Sarah’s voice cracked at the edges now. “You don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“Then explain it.”
Sarah looked at Lucy.
The little girl was studying the adults with wide brown eyes.
Dominic followed Sarah’s gaze and realized he was doing exactly what he had hated when he was young: letting dangerous adult secrets fill a room where a child had nowhere to escape them.
He exhaled.
“Nico.”
“Yes.”
“Get Bernadette. Have her take Lucy to the sunroom. Nobody else goes in.”
Sarah shook her head immediately. “No.”
Dominic met her eyes.
“Bernadette has been in this family for thirty-two years. If you don’t trust her, say it now.”
Something flickered in Sarah’s expression.
Too fast to name.
Then footsteps came down the hall.
Bernadette Monroe entered wearing a black dress, pearls and the expression of a woman who had already decided everyone around her was being inconvenient.
“What in heaven’s name—”
She saw Mr. Button.
The color vanished from her face.
Dominic’s attention sharpened.
Bernadette stopped breathing.
Not metaphorically.
He watched her chest go still.
“Bernadette,” he said.
Her eyes remained fixed on the rabbit.
“Oh,” she whispered.
Sarah closed her eyes.
Dominic looked between them.
“You know.”
Bernadette slowly lifted her gaze to him.
For thirty-two years she had been the one person in the Russo household who never looked afraid of Dominic.
Now she did.
“Take Lucy,” Sarah said quietly.
Bernadette hesitated.
“Please.”
The older woman crouched in front of the child.
“Would you like to help me choose flowers for the breakfast room?”
Lucy looked at her mother.
Sarah nodded.
“Can Mr. Button come?”
Dominic answered before anyone else could.
“No.”
Lucy’s mouth tightened.
Sarah’s hand came up.
“Dominic.”
It was the first time she had used his first name.
He heard it.
So did Nico.
Bernadette definitely heard it.
Dominic looked at the rabbit again.
Whatever was hidden inside its seam had survived four years. He could not let it walk out of the room in the arms of a three-year-old.
He crouched so he was closer to Lucy’s height.
“Mr. Button needs to stay here for a minute.”
Lucy hugged the rabbit tighter.
“No.”
“I’ll give him back.”
“How do I know?”
The question was so direct that Nico turned his face away, probably to hide a smile.
Dominic glanced at Sarah.
She did not help him.
Fair enough.
Dominic took a slow breath.
“Because I promise.”
Lucy studied him.
Children, Dominic thought, were terrible negotiators and excellent judges of hesitation.
Finally she walked forward and held out the rabbit.
Dominic accepted it with both hands.
The fabric was softer than he remembered.
Older.
Lighter.
He could still see a faint purple stain near the tail.
Grape juice.
Four years of death collapsed inside him.
His sister had been twenty-eight when her car exploded on the Taconic Parkway. The state police had recovered two bodies—Elena and the driver. The funeral had been closed casket. His father had insisted.
Dominic had not argued because his father was dying and grief had made everyone cruel.
He should have argued.
God, he should have argued.
Lucy touched the rabbit’s bent ear before letting go.
“He gets scared without me.”
Dominic’s throat tightened.
“I’ll be careful.”
Bernadette led Lucy out of the room.
The child’s torn shoe scraped the marble with every other step until the sound faded down the corridor.
Then Dominic turned.
Sarah was already backing away.
“Nico,” Dominic said.
His bodyguard moved to the doorway.
Sarah laughed once, without humor.
“So that’s what this is.”
“What?”
“A cage.”
Dominic placed Mr. Button on the table as gently as if the toy were alive.
“No. This is the part where you tell me why my dead sister’s rabbit belongs to your daughter.”
Sarah folded her arms.
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try.”
“You’ll do what men like you always do.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened. “And what is that?”
“You’ll hear one thing that belongs to you and decide everything attached to it belongs to you too.”
The words struck somewhere unpleasantly accurate.
He ignored that.
“Who gave Michael the rabbit?”
Sarah looked at Bernadette’s empty doorway.
Then at Nico.
Then at the key.
“Your sister.”
Dominic did not move.
Sarah’s next words were almost too quiet to hear.
“Three days after the world was told she died.”
Nico swore under his breath.
Dominic stared at her.
“No.”
“She was alive.”
“No.”
“She was alive when Michael found her.”
Dominic’s hand closed around the back of a dining chair.
The wood creaked.
Sarah continued before he could stop her.
“She was burned. She was bleeding. She had no phone and no identification. But she knew one thing with absolute certainty.”
Dominic’s voice came out rough.
“What?”
Sarah looked at him with eyes full of a grief he suddenly understood had never belonged to her husband alone.
“She said someone inside the Russo family had tried to kill her.”
The room went silent.
Then Sarah looked toward the corridor where Lucy had disappeared.
“And she begged Michael not to tell you she was alive.”
Dominic’s fingers released the chair.
“Why?”
Sarah’s face broke at last.
“Because she was pregnant.”
May you like
He stared at her.
Sarah whispered, “And because she thought the person who wanted her dead was close enough to you to hear everything you heard.”
