Chapter 5 - The First Collision
The autumn rain in Maine was relentless, turning the gravel paths of St. Jude’s Harbor into slick gray ribbons.
It was five in the afternoon, and the sky had already bruised into twilight. I had spent the afternoon restoring the gilding on a 19th-century church mirror, my fingers stained with gold leaf and sizing. I locked the front door of Walter’s shop, pulled my woolen scarf tightly around my chin, and turned toward the wooden staircase leading up to my boathouse loft.
A black SUV sat parked fifty feet away, its engine humming in the shadows beneath the pines.
My stomach dropped into a bottomless void.
It wasn't a local truck. It had dark tinted windows, low-profile tires, and New York commercial plates.
I didn't run. Running from Dante Caruso was like running from a wolf—it only triggered the instinct to run you down. I stood frozen on the gravel, my keys clutched between my knuckles, watching the driver’s side door swing open.
It wasn't Marco.
It was Dante.
He wore a dark charcoal wool coat, collar popped against the coastal wind. He looked hollowed out, dark circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes, but his gaze locked onto me with an intensity so fierce it felt like a physical blow. He walked toward me through the rain, his heavy boots crunching on the gravel, not caring that the downpour was soaking his hair.
He stopped three feet away. The rain fell between us like a bead curtain.
“You’re a hard woman to find, Elena,” he said. His voice was cracked, raw, stripped of its customary boardroom polish.
“You shouldn't have come, Dante,” I said, keeping my chin lifted, forcing my breathing to stay steady even as my pulse hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
“I shouldn't have come?” He let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh that sounded more like a choke. “You disappeared into thin air. You left your ring. You turned your back on eight years of marriage because of one stupid, drunken sentence at a gala!”
“It wasn't one sentence, Dante,” I said, my voice cutting through the sound of the rain. “It was three thousand days of slowly watching the man I loved turn into someone I despised.”
Dante flinched. For a man who had taken shrapnel and federal indictments without blinking, those words visibly wounded him.
“I came to bring you home,” he said, stepping closer, reaching for my hand. “The penthouse is empty. I can’t sleep. I can’t breathe in that fucking city without you. I fired the driver. I broke Nico Valenti’s face in front of half the commission. I told the family elders to go to hell. What else do you want, Elena? Tell me what you want, and I’ll buy it, I’ll kill it, or I’ll burn it to the ground.”
I looked at him—really looked at him. The expensive coat, the dangerous hands, the desperate fury in his eyes.
“You still don't get it,” I whispered, tears finally mixing with the rain on my cheeks. “You think love is a transaction. You think you can punch Nico Valenti and buy me a bigger diamond, and that erases the fact that you stopped respecting me years ago. You didn't protect me from the world, Dante. You protected yourself from being alone.”
“Elena, please,” he rasped, and the word sounded unnatural on his tongue. *Please.* Dante Caruso had never begged anyone in his life. “Come back. We’ll leave the city. We’ll go to Italy. Just... don't leave me in the dark.”
“I’m not your flashlight, Dante,” I said, pulling my hand out of reach as his fingers grazed my sleeve. “Go back to New York. Go be the king of your bloody little kingdom. I’m done being your queen.”
Before he could answer, the sharp beam of headlights swept over the gravel from the entrance of the harbor road. A second vehicle—a battered silver sedan with New York plates—roared into the lot, tires screaming against the wet stones.
Dante’s entire demeanor shifted in a microsecond. The wounded husband vanished; the mafia boss snapped into lethal focus.
“Get behind me,” Dante commanded, his hand darting under his coat.
“Dante—”
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“Get behind the woodpile, Elena! NOW!”
***
