DOMINIC POV
Dominic hasn't blinked in four hours.
The office is dark except for the glow of three computer screens. Financial records spread across the monitors like a map to Richard Chen's empire. Wire transfers. Shell companies. Bank accounts hidden behind corporate structures. Money moving through the world like blood through veins, always flowing, always hidden, always untraceable.
Almost untraceable.
Dominic has traced some of it. Enough to understand the scope of what Richard Chen built on blood money. Enough to know that Richard Chen is worth approximately three hundred million dollars. Enough to know that Richard Chen has been systematically laundering money from organized crime for thirty years while maintaining the image of a legitimate businessman.
And enough to know that Richard Chen paid two million dollars to have Dominic's father killed.
Dominic's office is on the seventy-first floor. The walls are soundproof. The furniture is expensive but sparse. No photographs. No personal touches. Nothing that could be used as leverage if someone broke in and tried to understand who he is.
His father had owned a restaurant. His father had believed in family meals and Sunday dinners and the kind of ordinary happiness that criminals aren't supposed to want.
His father was dead because he was in the way.
The office door opens. James Hart enters without knocking because James is allowed to break the rules. James is the only person Dominic has trusted in eight years.
"She's interesting," James says, moving to the desk without sitting down.
Dominic doesn't look up from the screens. "What do you mean?"
"I mean she didn't cry when we locked her in," James says. "She didn't panic. She didn't beg. She pulled out a notebook and started taking notes. She's analyzing something. You or the situation, I can't tell."
Dominic leans back in his chair slowly. He closes his eyes and thinks about the girl on the stage. He thinks about how she walked like she had a choice. He thinks about how her eyes met his and didn't flinch.
He thinks about how she looked at him like she was reading him.
"She's going to help me," Dominic says.
"Help you how?" James asks.
"Richard Chen has hidden money everywhere," Dominic explains, his voice steady. "Legitimate businesses. Illegal accounts. Shell companies. I've spent eight years trying to trace it. I've hit walls every time. But his daughter has been working as a financial analyst. She has a photographic memory for numbers. She's smart in the way that matters."
He opens his eyes and looks at James.
"If anyone can help me find his money, it's her."
James moves to the window. From seventy-one floors up, the city looks like it belongs to someone else. Like they're watching the world instead of living in it.
"She'll never cooperate," James says. "She'll fight you."
"Maybe," Dominic agrees. "Or maybe she'll realize that her father sold her to pay off a gambling debt and decide that cooperation is the smarter choice. Everyone has a price, James. Some people's price is money. Others' is survival. Some people's price is understanding that the person who raised them is a coward who chose himself over his own daughter."
He leans forward and pulls up a file on his computer. Maya Chen's background report appears on the screen. Financial analyst. Graduated top of her class. Clean record. No criminal connections. No boyfriend. No serious relationships. Just work and studying and the kind of isolated life that suggests someone is hiding from something.
"I'll find her price," Dominic says quietly. "And I'll use it."
James doesn't respond immediately. He understands what Dominic is saying. He understands that this isn't just business. This is personal. This is eight years of waiting finally reaching its moment.
"What happens after?" James asks. "After you use her to destroy her father. After you take everything from Richard Chen. What do you do with his daughter?"
Dominic doesn't answer because he doesn't know. That's the problem. That's the thing that's been keeping him awake since he saw her walk down those stairs.
He was supposed to hate her. She's the daughter of his enemy. She should be collateral damage or leverage or a tool to be discarded when it's no longer useful.
But she walked like she had dignity even though she was being sold.
She looked at him like she was trying to understand him instead of begging for mercy.
She didn't cry.
"Focus on the game," Dominic says to James, pushing the uncomfortable thought away. "Everything else comes later."
James leaves the office without saying anything else. He's learned not to push when Dominic closes a door.
Dominic turns back to his screens but his focus is fractured now. He opens a new file. Inside are photographs from eight years ago. Photographs of the restaurant after the explosion. Photographs of rubble and emergency crews and chaos.
Photographs of his father's body.
Giovanni Rossi in a casket. Anthony Rossi in a hospital bed that became a morgue. Eighteen other people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All of it paid for by Richard Chen.
All of it because Richard Chen decided Dominic's father was a business problem.
Dominic pulls up the surveillance photo of Maya from the auction house. The woman standing on the stage in her navy dress, composed and calm and completely unaware that her father is a murderer.
He compares the two images on his screen. The dead. The living daughter of the man who created the dead.
The irony is so sharp it could cut.
Richard Chen ordered the bombing because Giovanni Rossi was threatening his business interests. Richard Chen wanted to eliminate a problem. Richard Chen wanted to clear the board of obstacles.
And now Richard Chen's most valuable asset is locked in Dominic's penthouse.
Dominic can use her. He can break her. He can destroy everything Richard Chen cares about by systematically dismantling the daughter Richard tried so hard to protect from his world.
It would be perfect.
It would be just.
It would be exactly what Richard Chen deserves.
Dominic moves his cursor to her financial records. He pulls up her bank statements, her medical history, her private emails. He looks at her life stripped down to data. He sees a woman who's been isolated. A woman who spends her money on books and classical music and piano lessons. A woman who visits her mother's grave every Sunday.
A woman who loves someone who's rotten to the core.
The question Dominic can't stop asking himself is whether she knows what her father is.
Whether she knows about the bombing.
Whether she understands that the man who raised her is a murderer.
And if she does know, whether that knowledge will make it easier or harder to use her against him.
He picks up his phone and sends a message to his kitchen staff. Instructions for breakfast. Instructions for which clothes to lay out. Instructions to place a message on her nightstand.
He's already prepared everything for her. Her size. Her preferences. Her future.
He just needs to see if she's smart enough to understand what that means.
The message he writes is simple. Direct. Honest in the way that only someone who's already decided your fate can be honest.
He reads it before sending it through his secure system to his staff.
"You're going to help me destroy someone. If you cooperate, you survive. If you resist, you disappear like everyone else who gets in my way. Wear the black dress. We have work to do."
It's not a threat.
It's a promise.
Dominic sends the message and leans back in his chair. He looks at the photographs again. His father. His brother. The girl on the stage who belongs to him now.
He thinks about what James asked. What happens after.
He doesn't know.
All he knows is that Richard Chen's daughter is now living in his penthouse. All he knows is that she's smart enough to analyze her own prison instead of panicking. All he knows is that when she figures out who her father really is, when she understands why a man paid two million dollars to buy her, everything is going to change.
He just doesn't know if he's prepared for how much.
The sun is rising over Manhattan. The city is waking up. Down below, people are starting their days. They're getting breakfast. They're heading to work. They're living ordinary lives where the worst thing that can happen is losing a job or a relationship.
They're not locked in penthouse bedrooms waiting to meet the man who just bought them.
They don't have fathers who are murderers.
They don't have enemies who are patient enough to wait eight years for revenge.
Dominic closes the photographs and opens a new file. He starts reviewing financial records again, but his mind is somewhere else now.
His mind is on the sixty-eighth floor.
It's on the girl who didn't cry when the door locked.
It's on the woman who's about to realize that the father she's been analyzing from a distance is actually a man capable of anything.
And it's on what that realization is going to do to her when she understands that Dominic is planning to use that knowledge to destroy him completely.