Chapter 6 - The Mask Cracks
Carmine Falco agreed to a private meeting on neutral ground — a restaurant in Little Italy that had hosted commission business for three generations, its back room swept for surveillance twice a day and guarded like a vault.
Harper insisted on coming.
"Absolutely not," Dominic said, for the third time, pacing the length of their bedroom while she buttoned a coat over the slight, telltale curve of her stomach.
"If I hide, it looks like we're hiding something shameful. If I stand beside you, it looks like we're proud of it." Harper met his eyes steadily. "You told me two weeks ago that we do this together. Did you mean it, or was that just something you said in the moment?"
Dominic exhaled, long and rough, and finally nodded — not because he'd been persuaded the risk was gone, but because he understood, at last, that Harper Hayes had never been the fragile thing he'd once assumed he needed to shelter from his world. She'd survived poverty, a dying sister, a marriage built on threats, and six weeks of carrying a secret alone. She could survive one dinner with Carmine Falco.
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The old man was waiting when they arrived, seated at the head of a long table with two of his lieutenants flanking him, his expression unreadable in the way of men who'd spent forty years learning to give nothing away.
"Dominic. Mrs. Russo." His gaze slid to Harper's midsection with the precision of a man who already knew exactly why they'd requested this meeting. "I understand congratulations may be in order."
"They are," Dominic said, sitting without waiting for permission, a small act of defiance Harper recognized for what it was — a declaration that he no longer intended to sit at this table as a man being judged. "My wife is pregnant. The heir will be born within the family, under my protection, and I expect the commission to treat that news exactly the way it would treat the birth of any legitimate Russo heir."
Carmine steepled his fingers. "There are those on the commission who'll say this child was conceived outside the terms your marriage was arranged under. That makes some men nervous, Dominic. Nervous men make dangerous decisions."
"Then let me remove the nervousness," Dominic said, and something in his voice had changed since the night Harper told him the truth — steadier, harder, absolutely certain. "This marriage started as an arrangement. It isn't one anymore. Harper is my wife in every sense that matters, and our child will be raised as the next generation of this family, whether the commission blesses it or not. I'm not asking permission, Carmine. I'm informing you, out of respect for the years my father served beside yours."
Silence settled over the table, thick and dangerous. Harper held her breath, watching the old man's face for some sign of the verdict about to fall.
Then, unexpectedly, Carmine laughed — a dry, rasping sound. "Your father," he said, "would never have had the nerve to speak to me that way." He studied Dominic for a long moment, something almost like respect flickering behind his hooded eyes. "Perhaps that's exactly why this family needs you instead of him. Very well. The child is protected. But you should know — Sofia Marchetti has already been telling a different story to certain members of the commission. One where your wife is a plant, an outsider positioned to weaken this family from within."
"Sofia's story is a lie," Dominic said flatly.
"I believe you," Carmine said. "Not everyone will."
---
They left the restaurant with an uneasy truce and a target still on their backs, and Dominic's security chief was waiting at the curb with news that confirmed exactly what Carmine had warned them about: two more vehicles had been spotted near the penthouse that afternoon, and this time, they hadn't left when confronted.
That night, the attack came.
Harper woke to shouting in the hallway, to the concussive crack of gunfire somewhere below, to Dominic hauling her out of bed and into a reinforced safe room behind her closet before she'd even fully processed what was happening.
"Stay here," he said, pressing a gun into her hands with shaking urgency — the first time she'd ever seen his composure genuinely crack. "Lock the door behind me. Whatever you hear, do not open it for anyone but me or Elias."
"Dominic—"
"I love you," he said, cupping her face for one desperate second. "Both of you. I'm not losing either of you tonight."
May you like
Then he was gone, and Harper was alone in the dark with her heart hammering and one hand pressed protectively over the small swell of her stomach, listening to chaos erupt on the other side of a steel door, praying to a god she wasn't sure she believed in that the man she loved would walk back through it alive.
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