Chapter 1 No.1

Faye Hartman POV

Regret tasted like stale whiskey and impending death.

I woke to the rhythmic thud of a headache behind my eyes and the heavy, unfamiliar weight of Egyptian cotton sheets. This wasn't my room. The air smelled different here-sharp, expensive, like sandalwood and cold rain.

Panic, cold and immediate, seized my chest. I sat up, clutching the duvet to my chest, and the movement drew my gaze to the man sleeping beside me.

He was lying on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow. He was massive, his shoulders broad and sculpted with a lethal kind of strength that my husband, Joshua, had never possessed. But it was his back that made my breath hitch. A jagged, ugly scar tore across his right shoulder blade, a map of violence etched into bronze skin.

*What have I done?*

Memories of the Charity Gala flashed in disjointed bursts. The suffocating polite conversation. Joshua ignoring me for his phone. The whiskey I shouldn't have touched. The stranger with eyes like storm clouds who had looked at me not as a hostage, not as a Hartman trophy, but as a woman.

I scrambled out of bed, my legs trembling. My silver silk dress was a puddle of shame on the floor. I snatched it up, my hands shaking so hard I could barely pull the zipper.

I needed to leave. Now. Before he woke up. Before Joshua realized I hadn't come home.

I reached for my clutch on the nightstand and froze.

Next to a heavy crystal tumbler sat a notepad. Embossed in the thick, cream paper was a black, gothic 'C'.

*Caldwell.*

The blood drained from my face. I hadn't just cheated on my husband; I had slept with a member of his family. The family that had decimated mine, the family that held me captive in a loveless, political marriage. If Joshua found out, I would be punished. If *The Don*-Anthony Caldwell, the monster who ruled this city-found out I had tainted his bloodline with my infidelity, I would disappear.

I looked at the sleeping man. He wasn't Joshua. He was too big, too scarred. A cousin? An enforcer?

It didn't matter. I had to make sure he never looked for me. I had to make this meaningless. A transaction.

I opened my wallet. Three hundred dollars. It was pathetic, but it was all I had in cash. I pulled a pen from the nightstand-a heavy Montblanc that probably cost more than my life was worth-and tore a page from the notepad.

*For the service. Keep the change.*

I shoved the bills and the note under the crystal glass. It was an insult. A way to reduce a night of earth-shattering passion into a cheap exchange. If he thought I was just a bored, rich wife paying for a gigolo, maybe his pride would stop him from chasing me.

I grabbed my heels, not daring to put them on yet, and ran. The plush carpet swallowed the sound of my bare feet as I fled the penthouse, escaping the cage I had built for myself, only to run back to the one I had been sold into.

*

Anthony Caldwell POV

The door clicked shut, and the silence of the penthouse returned.

I didn't move for a long moment. I lay there, listening to the fading echo of her footsteps. Usually, the morning after a woman stayed over-which was rare-my skin crawled. My senses, always dialed up to a maddening eleven, would scream at the lingering perfume, the noise of their breathing, the cloying neediness.

But with her... there was only silence. A heavy, velvet quiet that settled over the chaos in my head.

She was an anchor.

I rolled over and sat up, the sheets pooling at my waist. The headache that usually plagued me was gone, replaced by a strange, hollow hunger. I wanted her back in this bed. I wanted to know why a woman with sadness in her eyes tasted like salvation.

My gaze drifted to the nightstand.

A stack of crumpled bills sat under my water glass. A piece of paper fluttered slightly in the draft from the air conditioning.

I frowned, reaching out to snatch the paper.

*For the service. Keep the change.*

The words hit me like a physical blow. The air in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees.

A low, dark sound rumbled in my chest-half laugh, half growl. She thought I was a whore? Me? The man who held the leash of every politician and criminal in Chicago?

She had left me three hundred dollars.

I crushed the note and the money in my fist, my knuckles turning white. The insult burned, hot and bright, but beneath it, something darker uncoiled. A possessive, predatory instinct that I hadn't felt in years.

She thought she could use me, pay me, and discard me?

I picked up the internal phone and dialed a single number.

"Don?" Clay Shepard's voice was sharp, alert.

"Check the penthouse elevator and lobby surveillance from the last ten minutes," I ordered, my voice a jagged blade of ice. "Find the woman in the silver dress."

"Is there a problem, sir?"

I looked at the empty side of the bed, the indent of her body still visible on the pillow.

"No," I said softly, dangerously. "But there is going to be."

I stood up, the predator fully awake now.

"I don't care what it takes, Clay. Find her. And bring her to me."