My name is Adrian Moretti. At thirty-nine, I’d built the kind of reputation along the Chicago waterfront that made dangerous men choose their words carefully around me.
At 12:03 a.m., three tiny knocks tapped against my bedroom door inside an estate guarded like a fortress. In my world, a midnight visitor usually meant betrayal, blood, or death, but when I opened the door, I found a barefoot three-year-old girl clutching a battered stuffed rabbit. Then Lily looked up at me and whispered, “Mr. Adrian, the bad man found us.”
My name is Adrian Moretti. At thirty-nine, I’d built the kind of reputation along the Chicago waterfront that made dangerous men choose their words carefully around me.
But that night, Lily Bennett wasn’t afraid of me.
She was afraid of someone else.
“My mommy won’t wake up.”
Those five words changed everything.
I asked where her mother was, but Lily only stared up at my six-foot-three frame.
“You’re too tall,” she whispered. “I can’t tell you from down here.”
So I knelt on the marble floor.
She told me her mother had come home with a terrible headache. Later, Lily heard something crash. She found Claire beside the dresser, making a strange sound but refusing to open her eyes.
I started to rise.
Lily grabbed my fingers.
“There’s something else.”
Her eyes darted toward the dark hallway.
“The bad man found us.”
Cold moved through me.
“What bad man?”
“The one Mommy said I can never go with.”
“Tell me his name.”
She hugged the rabbit against her chest.
“Victor Kane.”
For one second, the entire house seemed to go silent.
Three days earlier, Victor Kane had sat across from me in a downtown conference room and lied directly to my face.
Now his name was coming from a terrified child inside my locked estate.
Lily led me to the staff apartments, where I found Claire unconscious on the floor. Her pulse raced beneath my fingers. Her skin was cold and damp.
I called my private physician, then security.
“Lock every gate,” I ordered. “Nobody leaves. Nobody comes in.”
Seventeen minutes later, Dr. Michael Grant was treating Claire while Lily sat nearby, watching him with enormous frightened eyes.
Eventually, Claire’s color began to return.
Then Michael pulled me into the hallway.
“Exhaustion. Severe dehydration. Low blood pressure,” he said.
I studied his face. “That’s not everything.”
“No.”
My stomach tightened.
“There’s a sedative in her system.”
“Prescription?”
“No bottle. Nothing in her medical information that explains it.”
“Could she have taken it herself?”
Michael hesitated.
That hesitation told me more than his answer could.
“You don’t think she did.”
“No.”
I looked through the doorway.
Claire lay unconscious beneath a blanket. Lily sat beside her, one tiny hand resting on her mother’s arm.
My estate had iron gates, armed guards, cameras, and motion sensors. Nobody was supposed to reach that woman without me knowing.
Yet someone had.
And suddenly I understood something far worse.
Lily hadn’t come to my room because her mother was sick.
She had come because someone had taught her that if Victor Kane ever found them, she needed to find the one man he might actually fear.
Me.
But Claire had never told me why.
And if Victor was already inside my estate, I might have only minutes to find out.
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