Eleven Weeks in the Dark
Chapter 01 - Eleven Weeks in the Dark
Blood was drying on my cuff when I walked into my Chicago penthouse at 1:43 a.m., but the violence I'd left behind was nothing compared with what waited inside my own home.
Before I could touch the lights, my housekeeper stepped from the darkness and whispered, “Don't make a sound.”
Then she showed me why my fiancée had spent eleven weeks terrifying my children.
And why losing my temper was exactly what she needed.
For fifteen years, I'd built a life people mistook for power.
From the outside, it looked untouchable: a glass-walled penthouse above Lake Shore Drive, tailored suits, black SUVs, a logistics empire, charity galas, and politicians shaking my hand for photographs.
What those photographs never showed were men bleeding at the docks, or the midnight decisions that made sure someone didn't see sunrise.
That night, I'd just left a violent meeting by the Chicago River and wanted nothing more than a shower and five minutes of silence.
Instead, Naomi Wells stepped from beside the piano.
“Don't turn on the lights.”
My hand instinctively moved toward the gun at my back, but Naomi's voice sharpened.
“Take your hand off it. If you pull that gun, you'll destroy the only chance your children have left.”
Nobody spoke to me that way.
“You have three seconds.”
“Your son is awake. Your daughter is trying not to cry. And the woman you're about to marry is teaching them to hate themselves.”
Everything inside me went still.
Camille Sloane wasn't the love of my life.
She was a political engagement, the daughter of Patrick Sloane, whose criminal empire controlled routes my organization needed, and marrying her meant peace.
I'd convinced myself I could survive the arrangement.
I'd never once asked what my children were surviving.
Naomi stepped closer and told me that if I confronted Camille, she'd cry, blame the children's behavior on grief, call Naomi a liar, and have Patrick informed before sunrise.
When I demanded to know how she could possibly be so certain, Naomi whispered, “Because I've been recording her for eleven weeks.”
Then I heard my five-year-old daughter.
“Please... can I just go to bed?”
Naomi pulled me behind a column as I stared through the half-open library doors.
Rosie stood barefoot on the rug with tears trapped beneath her lashes, while my eight-year-old son, Jack, stood beside her with his hands behind his back like a soldier waiting to be punished.
Camille was holding Rosie's stuffed rabbit, the one my late wife, Isabella, had sewn before she died.
“What do you say when you make this household difficult?” she asked with sickening sweetness.
“I make everything hard,” Rosie whispered.
“Again.”
“I make everything hard.”
Something inside my chest tore open.
Camille turned toward Jack.
“Tell me the sentence.”
“If Dad sees weakness,” my son whispered, “he sends it away.”
My fist slammed against the column, but Naomi caught my wrist before I could move.
She shoved a phone into my hand.
Video after video showed Rosie watching Camille pour orange juice over her drawings, Jack kneeling with heavy books held straight out in trembling arms, and Camille telling him, “Your father notices results, not feelings.”
Then came the clip that made breathing impossible.
Rosie was sitting frozen at the piano while Camille leaned toward her ear.
“Your mother died because soft women break things. Do you want to grow up and break your father too?”
Naomi swiped again.
Messages appeared between Camille and Arthur Velez, my attorney, my fixer, the man I'd trusted for ten years.
They were arranging amended guardianship papers for me to sign the following afternoon.
One message read:
ONCE ROMAN SIGNS, THE CHILDREN CAN BE MOVED QUIETLY.
My stomach turned to ice.
“She isn't just abusing them,” Naomi whispered. “She's preparing to take them.”
Then Jack shouted from inside the library, “Don't touch that. It was Mom's.”
Camille slapped him across the head.
Every violent instinct I'd sharpened over fifteen years exploded, and I stepped forward, but Naomi planted both hands against my chest.
“She wants this. She wants the dangerous widower attacking his fiancée in front of witnesses.”
Suddenly, I saw the trap.
Camille looked down at my terrified children and calmly threatened to accuse Jack of hitting her and Rosie of attacking the nanny if they told me anything.
My daughter's face crumpled.
Naomi leaned toward me.
“Roman, this isn't about marrying you.”
I looked at her, barely breathing.
Her eyes never left Camille.
“It's about what happens to your children after you're dead.”
I wanted to tell her nobody was killing me.
Then she opened another folder on the phone.
Photographs of my medication.
My travel calendar.
My private physician's number.
A copy of my will.
And a message from Arthur Velez to Camille:
HE DOESN'T NEED TO DIE BEFORE THE WEDDING. HE ONLY NEEDS TO SIGN BEFORE SOMETHING HAPPENS.
For the first time that night, fear reached me before anger.
Naomi felt it.
“Now you understand.”
I looked through the library door at Jack and Rosie.
My children had spent eleven weeks learning how to survive a woman I had invited into their home.
And somewhere between her cruelty and Arthur's legal paperwork was a plan that assumed I would not be alive long enough to stop it.
So I did the one thing nobody in that penthouse expected.
I obeyed the maid.
I stayed hidden.
And watched long enough to learn that Camille was not the person in the room my children feared most.
At 1:58 a.m., the private elevator opened behind us.
Arthur Velez stepped into the penthouse carrying the guardianship papers I was supposed to sign in twelve hours.
Before Arthur arrived, Naomi gave me one more warning.
“Don't look at the children like you know.”
I frowned.
“They'll see.”
She was right.
Jack had learned to study adults the way I studied negotiations.
Rosie watched mouths before voices.
Fear had made them observant.
I hated recognizing myself in that.
Naomi took the recording phone back long enough to lower its brightness.
“You also need to wash the blood off your cuff.”
I looked down.
“In five minutes?”
“In thirty seconds. Bathroom by the music room.”
I almost told her nobody ordered me around in my own home.
Then I remembered what my authority had missed for eleven weeks.
I went.
Cold water pinked the sink.
For the first time, the blood I brought home looked less like evidence of strength and more like something my children might have seen.
When I returned, Naomi looked at the clean cuff.
“Better.”
May you like
It was a ridiculous word.
It still felt like the first instruction I had followed for the right reason in years.
