Chapter 3: What Mia Saw
Dominic answered the call.
He said nothing.
He simply pressed the phone to his ear and waited.
"Nathan?" Claire's voice came through clear and unhurried.
"Is it done?
Did you move her before he got back?"
The cellar was absolutely silent.
Dominic looked at Nathan.
Nathan's face had gone the color of old wax.
"It's not Nathan," Dominic said.
Three full seconds passed.
"Dom." Her voice shifted instantly — warm, startled, relieved.
"Oh thank God.
I've been trying to reach you.
Something terrible has happened with Mia.
Nathan told me she was found, that she'd been—"
"Stop."
The word landed like a closed door.
"You called Nathan's phone to ask if she'd been moved.
Try again."
Silence.
Then: "I want to speak to my attorney."
Dominic ended the call and put the phone in his coat pocket.
He turned to Marcus.
"Find her.
She doesn't leave the estate."
Marcus was already moving up the stairs.
Dominic crouched again beside Mia.
She was sitting upright now, Harper still pressed against her side.
Someone had brought a bottle of water from the emergency kit on the wall.
Mia held it in both hands, which were shaking badly.
"What did you see?" Dominic asked.
"Before they brought you down here."
Mia took a slow breath.
"Three weeks ago.
I was restocking the east study.
The door was open a few inches.
I heard Claire on the phone." She paused.
"She was reading numbers.
Account numbers, I think.
Long ones.
And she said a name."
"What name?"
"Renner."
Nathan made a sound near the doorway.
Not a word.
Just a sound.
Dominic stood and looked at him.
"Victor Renner," Dominic said.
It wasn't a question.
Nathan said nothing, which was its own answer.
Victor Renner ran a financial operation out of Montreal that Dominic's organization had been quietly blocking from expanding south for two years.
Not through violence.
Through banking relationships, through port access, through the kind of invisible pressure that never made news.
Renner had been trying to find a way in for eighteen months.
And Claire had been in Dominic's home for fourteen of them.
"How long," Dominic said to Nathan, "have you known?"
"Dom—"
"How long."
Nathan's jaw moved.
"Six weeks."
The number hung in the cold air.
Six weeks.
While Dominic had been signing vendors for a wedding.
While he had been choosing a ring.
While Harper had been sleeping two floors above a woman who was planning to hand his entire operation to a rival.
"She came to me," Nathan said.
"She told me she'd found out things.
About Renner.
About what he was planning.
She said she needed time to gather proof before she brought it to you.
She said if we moved too fast, Renner would disappear and we'd lose the evidence."
"And you believed her."
"She had documents, Dom.
Real ones.
Wire transfers.
A name inside our operation who'd been feeding Renner information for years."
"And the name?"
Nathan looked at the floor.
"Me," he said.
"She told me the name was me.
That she was protecting me by keeping quiet.
That if I helped her manage things until after the wedding, she would destroy the file."
Dominic looked at him for a long time.
"She had you helping her cover up what she was doing," he said, "by convincing you that you were the one being protected."
Nathan didn't answer.
Mia's voice came quietly from the corner.
"There was a second call.
Two days before they brought me down here.
I wasn't trying to listen.
I was in the hallway." She looked at Dominic.
"She told someone that the wedding needed to happen.
That once she was your wife, everything changed legally.
The accounts.
The property.
The authority structure."
Harper looked up at her mother.
She didn't understand the words.
But she understood her mother's face.
"Mommy," she said.
"Are we safe now?"
Mia pulled her closer and said nothing.
Dominic looked at the iron door, still hanging open.
The broken lock lay on the stone floor.
He picked it up, turned it once in his hand, and set it on the wine rack beside Mia.
"You're safe," he said.
To both of them.
He walked to the doorway and stopped beside Nathan.
"You have one chance to tell me everything.
Every document she showed you.
Every name she mentioned.
Every conversation." He didn't raise his voice.
"If I find out later that you held something back, I won't ask twice."
Nathan nodded.
His hands were at his sides.
He looked like a man who had just understood, too late, exactly how completely he had been used.
From somewhere above them, Marcus's voice came down the staircase.
"She's gone, Dom.
Car's still here.
She went on foot."
Dominic looked up at the ceiling of the cellar, as though he could see through the stone to the gray morning outside.
"She won't get far in this cold," Daniel said.
"That's not what I'm worried about," Dominic said.
May you like
He turned back to the staircase.
"I'm worried about who she called before she ran."
