Chapter 7 - The Logic of the Safe House
By the middle of November, the mansion in Highland Park had been completely purged. Victoria’s clothes, her portraits, and her expensive French perfumes had been burned in the large incinerator behind the carriage house, their ashes scattered across the cold waters of Lake Michigan.
The east wing was no longer a golden cage. The heavy oak door had been taken off its hinges, replaced by a wide, open archway that allowed the sound of Arthur’s laughter to carry down the long marble hallway toward the kitchen.
Fiona had moved into the sunroom suite on the first floor—not as a prisoner, but as the director of the Costello private medical foundation, a new entity Dominic had incorporated to fund the distribution of clean medical supplies to the clinics on the South Side.
“You’re lingering, Dominic,” Fiona said on a Tuesday evening, looking up from her desk in the library. The room was warm, filled with the scent of old leather books and the deep, rich aroma of a real oak wood fire crackling in the hearth.
Dominic was standing near the floor-to-ceiling windows, his dark suit jacket unbuttoned, his green—no, icy blue—eyes fixed on the driveway where the snow was beginning to cover the gravel in a layer of clean white lace.
“The Cicero network is cleared, Fiona,” Dominic said, his voice a low, gravelly baritone that had lost its edge of desperation. “Moretti took a plea bargain this morning. He’s doing twenty-five years in Leavenworth. The hospital got its oncology files back.”
“That’s good for business, Dominic,” Fiona said, standing up from her desk and walking over to the window beside him. She was wearing a simple, high-necked blue dress that matched the color of his eyes, her hair loose over her shoulders. “But that’s not why you’ve been standing here for twenty minutes.”
Dominic turned his head, his large hand reaching out to catch her fingers where they rested against the wood of the window frame. He didn't pull her closer; he simply held her hand with the quiet, unyielding gravity of a man who had finally found his anchor.
“Arthur asked me this morning why you don't sleep in the main house, Fiona,” Dominic murmured, his thumb brushing against her wrist where her pulse was steady and honest. “He told me the Sandman doesn't come back when your shoes are in the hallway.”
Fiona looked down at their joined hands, her heart skipping a beat in her chest before her regular, emergency-room rhythm reasserted itself. “Arthur is seven years old, Dominic. He’s allowed to be sentimental.”
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“I’m not being sentimental,” Dominic said, stepping closer until the scent of his bergamot and dark leather completely surrounded her. “I’m thirty-eight years old, Fiona. I’ve spent my whole life managing a network of thieves, politicians, and men who would kill me for a percent of the port authority. But when I saw you on that wall with my boy in your arms, I realized I didn't own anything that mattered until you got into that SUV.”
He lifted her hand until her knuckles brushed against his cheek, where the skin was warm and rough from the winter wind. “Stay here. Not for the contract. Not for the quarter of a million dollars. Stay because the house is empty when you walk out the gate.”
