Chapter 10 - The Dawn Over the Harbor
Six months later, the morning sun rose over the Boston Harbor without a single cloud to break the light.
From the forty-seventh floor of 400 Atlantic Avenue, the water looked like hammered gold, stretching out past the harbor islands toward the open Atlantic. The cranes at the South Boston container terminal were moving with steady, rhythmic precision, their operators working under a new collective bargaining agreement signed by Crosswell Enterprises and approved without a single objection from the State Transportation Committee.
Congressman Hale had resigned three months ago, citing "health reasons," forty-eight hours before the Department of Justice unsealed an eighty-count indictment for maritime wire fraud and conspiracy.
The old clinic in the basement had been dismantled.
In its place stood the new Vance Community Surgical Center on Commercial Street—a three-story, state-of-the-art trauma facility with four fully equipped surgical bays, forty beds, and a board of directors that answered directly to Elena Vance, RN, BSN.
Officially, it was funded by an endowment from the Crosswell Foundation.
Unofficially, the men who arrived at two in the morning with bullet wounds still didn't have their names entered into the state database, but they were treated by the best surgical staff money could buy, and they were never asked to swear an oath to anyone other than the woman who ran the floor.
I stood by the penthouse windows, holding a porcelain cup of Earl Grey tea.
I wasn't wearing scrubs. I wasn't wearing the oversized cashmere sweater from the safe house.
I wore a dark emerald silk dressing gown that fell to my ankles, the heavy fabric cool against my skin, my dark hair falling loose over my shoulders without a single hairpin in sight.
A pair of large, warm hands settled over my hips, drawing me back against a chest that had become as familiar to me as my own breath.
Damian pressed his chin into the crown of my head, looking out at the shipping lanes where three massive container vessels were clearing the light at Boston Harbor.
“You’re late for your board meeting,” he murmured, his voice rich, low, and heavy with the sleep of a man who no longer had to wake up every ninety minutes to check his security feeds.
“The board can wait fifteen minutes,” I replied, leaning my head back against his shoulder. “The medical director is currently busy managing an executive patient.”
“Is that what I am?”
I turned in the circle of his arms until I was facing him.
The scar through his left eyebrow was still there, of course, but the cold, predatory tension that had lived in the lines around his mouth for ten years had softened into something deeper, more permanent, and infinitely more dangerous to my peace of mind.
He reached up, his thumb tracing the small, pale scar along my collarbone—a souvenir from a shard of flying glass at Fort Point that had healed into a thin silver line.
“Your sister called from Moosehead,” Damian said softly. “She wants to know if we’re coming up for Thanksgiving.”
“That depends,” I said, my fingers sliding up the lapels of his linen robe to rest against the strong, steady pulse at his throat.
“On what?”
“On whether you’re going to bring six armed men in black Suburbans to my niece’s eight-year-old birthday party.”
Damian smiled—a real smile, the kind that transformed his face from an iron monument into something breathtakingly human.
“Four,” he negotiated smoothly. “And they’ll stay at the end of the driveway dressed like Canadian fly fishermen.”
“Two,” I countered. “And they have to help my brother-in-law rake the leaves.”
“Done,” he said.
He looked down at me, his gaze moving slowly from my eyes down to the emerald silk, then back up again, his pupils expanding until the gray of his irises was swallowed by the dark.
“You look magnificent in green, Elena,” he murmured, his hands sliding down to the small of my back, drawing me against him until there was no daylight left between our bodies. “Almost as good as you looked in that red dress.”
“That red dress was a target, Mr. Cross.”
“No,” Damian said, leaning down until his lips brushed against mine with a slow, deliberate heat that made the city below us disappear into a golden blur. “That red dress was the best decision Julian Mercer ever made. Because it was the first time in two years I finally saw what was standing right in front of me.”
I smiled against his mouth, my hands tangling into the slate-colored hair at the back of his neck, feeling the scar tissue behind his ear—smooth, fully healed, and closed with six perfect stitches that had held through the fire.
May you like
“Shut up, Damian,” I whispered against his lips.
And for once in his life, Boston’s most feared man did exactly what he was told.
