Chapter 1 - The Shattered Glass and the Crimson Tide“
If Roman Duca gets bored with you before Christmas, I’ve got five hundred dollars on the divorce.”
That was what one of the richest men in Bell Haven said at my wedding, loud enough for half the ballroom to hear. He didn't even try to hide his smirk behind a glass of vintage champagne. To him, and to everyone else who had squeezed their way into the Duca estate’s glass-domed conservatory, I was nothing more than an exotic, pathetic curiosity. Clara Whitmore: the quiet, plain girl from the wrong side of town who ran a struggling dress-making shop, suddenly elevated to the throne of the most feared crime syndicate boss on the Eastern Seaboard.
Twenty minutes later, bullets came through the windows.
“Everybody down!”
The first high-caliber round shattered the crystal champagne flute resting lightly in my fingertips. Crystal exploded outward, a glittering constellation of sharp glass that sprayed across the pristine white linen of the bridal table. A woman shrieked—a high, piercing sound that cut straight through the ambient noise. The string quartet stopped playing so abruptly that the first violinist's bow dragged wildly across the strings, producing an awful, flat squealing noise before the musician dove headfirst beneath the staging.
I didn’t move.
I couldn’t.
I stood there in my heavy, multi-layered ivory gown, my palm bleeding where a stray sliver of glass had bitten deep into my skin. Hundreds of high-society guests, politicians with hidden bribes in their pockets, and underworld figures with blood on their cuffs were already crawling frantically across the imported Persian rugs, screaming for mercy.
Welcome to married life.
Another heavy slug slammed into the reinforced storm-glass windows overlooking the churning Atlantic, spreading a massive, intricate spiderweb of cracks across the pane. The glass didn’t shatter completely—Roman didn’t skimp on security—but the deafening crack echoed like thunder through the vaulted ceiling.
Roman Duca stood calm and motionless beside the massive black marble fireplace.
He didn’t duck. Of course he didn’t.
My husband had been called a lot of things across Bell Haven, Massachusetts. Businessman. Shipping magnate. Syndicate kingpin. Cold-blooded monster. Nobody, in all the years of his ruthless reign, had ever called him nervous.
His dark, calculating eyes swept the sprawling ballroom precisely once. Then, they landed squarely on me.
“Clara. Get down.”
It was the first time he’d actually used my first name all night.
I dropped clumsily behind the heavy oak structure of the bridal table just as another rapid-fire succession of rounds punched clean through the exterior masonry, showering us with fine white dust and plaster. Roman’s personal security detail moved with terrifying, practiced synchronization. Inside their tailored black Brioni jackets, weapons materialized in fractions of a second. Heavy deadbolts slammed home on the reinforced steel doors. The very people who had spent the last three hours whispering behind their hands about how the “ugliest girl in town” had somehow trapped Bell Haven’s most eligible and dangerous bachelor were now whimpering, begging those same armed thugs to shield them from the dark.
It is genuinely funny how quickly human beings rediscover their manners when lead starts flying.
I ducked lower, wiping a streak of dust from my cheek, and peered past the edge of the table toward the wide stone terrace. My mother, Eleanor, had been standing out there, sipping ginger ale and looking entirely out of place among the diamond-encrusted elite, just five minutes ago.
Now, the terrace was completely empty.
I pushed myself up onto my knees.
Roman crossed the polished ballroom before I could take two steps out from my hiding spot. His large hand closed around my bare wrist like a steel manacle.
“Where are you going?” he demanded, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that vibrated right through my chest.
“My mother.”
“She’s protected.”
“I need to see her with my own eyes, Roman.”
“You need to stay alive.”
That sentence irritated me far more than it reasonably should have. Perhaps it was because my entire marriage had begun with somebody telling me what I needed, without ever asking what I actually wanted.
Three weeks earlier, Roman Duca had walked unannounced into my little bridal alteration shop on a miserable, rainy Tuesday afternoon. The bell above the door had chimed, and he had dropped a thick manila folder right beside my whirring sewing machine, splashing dark rainwater across bolts of silk and lace.
My father, Henry Whitmore, had passed away three weeks prior after eighteen agonizing months of chemotherapy and hospital bills. I had naively assumed that bottomless grief was the worst legacy he could possibly leave behind.
I was catastrophically wrong.
Henry Whitmore had spent his final years gambling away everything our family owned, secretly borrowing nearly twelve million dollars through a labyrinth of shell companies directly connected to Roman Duca’s underground financing network. Our family home was tied up as collateral. My little shop was collateral. Six acres of prime municipal waterfront property near the old shipping harbor—property the city had been trying to buy for a fraction of its worth—were collateral.
Roman’s solution to this colossal financial disaster was printed on expensive, cream-colored stationery inside that folder.
Marriage.
When he laid it out for me, sitting across from my cluttered cutting table with his coat unbuttoned and his eyes devoid of any human warmth, I had actually laughed. A dry, humorless sound.
“You want to marry me?” I had asked, incredulous.
“I want the harbor property,” he replied flatly.
“Take it. Sell it. Turn it into a parking lot.”
“Owning it through standard foreclosure triggers prolonged federal scrutiny and several complex municipal lawsuits,” he explained, as if reading from a quarterly report. “A legitimate marriage transfers the primary assets cleanly under estate inheritance and spousal protection clauses. It keeps the auditors looking the other way.”
“Well, that has got to be the least romantic proposal in the entire history of American jurisprudence.”
“It isn’t a proposal, Clara. It’s an arrangement.”
He said it without a single trace of a smile. I hated him in that exact microsecond. I hated his tailored suit, his infuriating logic, and the way his presence made the small room feel suffocatingly tiny.
“What happens if I say no?” I asked, my voice trembling despite my best efforts to sound brave.
“Your mother loses her house by Friday morning. Your shop is boarded up by noon. The remaining unsecured creditors will come after whatever personal property you have left, down to the clothes in your wardrobe.”
Cold. Absolute. Surgical. Like he was discussing an unfavorable inventory write-off with a junior accountant.
My mother, Eleanor, had spent thirty-five years of her life in that creaky old house on Elm Street. Thanksgiving dinners with the smell of roasting turkey filling the halls. Christmas lights strung crookedly along the porch rails every December. My high-school graduation photographs proudly displayed beside the fieldstone fireplace. My late father’s stubborn coffee stain still lived on the white laminate kitchen counter because Mom stubbornly refused to replace the tile, insisting it reminded her of him sitting there reading the morning paper.
So, I signed my name on the dotted line.
Roman got his strategic harbor foothold and legal shield. I got thirty days of grace before foreclosure obliterated what was left of my family’s dignity.
That was the grand romance of Clara and Roman Duca.
Now, standing on the floor of our high-society wedding reception while the room echoed with the terrifying pop of suppressed gunfire, I yanked my wrist forcefully out of his grip.
“I stopped following orders,” I snapped, my eyes flashing into his dark gaze, “the exact moment your rich friends started placing side bets on how fast you’d dump me in a dumpster.”
Something sharp and unreadable flickered across Roman’s harsh features.
Before he could answer, the overhead chandeliers flickered once, twice, and then died completely. Total, suffocating darkness descended upon the grand hall, broken only by the pulsing, rhythmic flash of red emergency strobe lights mounted along the baseboards.
Gunfire erupted again, closer this time, chewing through the wooden doors of the vestibule.
Roman moved with blinding speed. He caught me around the waist with one powerful arm, driving us both violently to the floor. His heavy, muscular body covered mine entirely, acting as a human shield against the flying debris. He drew his custom sidearm with his free hand and fired twice into the pitch-black corridor beyond the ruined archway.
Emergency red light washed over overturned mahogany chairs, spilled rivers of vintage champagne, and terrified socialites crawling frantically across a forty-thousand-dollar imported rug.
“Stay directly behind me,” Roman ordered, his breath warm against my ear.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” I whispered back, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
“You don’t need to.”
“I need to know where we are going, Roman!”
“I need you to stay alive.”
He didn't wait for my retort. He dragged me bodily across the floor toward the massive stone fireplace, reached up, and pressed a hidden iron toggle disguised as soot-blackened mortar. A heavy section of the stonework clicked, hissed, and swung inward, revealing a pitch-black, narrow stone passage carved deep within the reinforced concrete wall.
Naturally. Of course my billionaire crime-boss husband’s mansion came equipped with secret medieval murder tunnels. Why wouldn’t it?
One of his heavily armed guards materialized out of the shadows of the alcove, his assault rifle raised.
“Boss, the perimeter breach is coordinated. They’re coming through the service elevators.”
“Take Mrs. Duca upstairs to the master suite,” Roman commanded, shoving me gently toward the dark opening.
I dug my heels into the stone floor. “I am not going anywhere until I see my mother.”
The guard hesitated, his eyes darting between us. Roman turned his dark gaze back to me, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek.
“Eleanor was moved to the subterranean safe room beneath the main kitchen twenty minutes before the ceremony even started,” Roman said tightly. “There are eight armed men guarding her door.”
I froze, the blood draining from my face. “How did you know to move her before the shooting even started?”
May you like
Roman’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. “I didn’t.”
That single, chilling answer followed us like a cold shadow as the guard dragged me upward through the twisting, concrete-lined utility stairwell toward the private upper floors of Duca House.
