Chapter 1 - The Weight of a Name
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Dominic looked down.
"Marcus was always outside looking in. The bastard son. Never good enough."
His gray eyes hardened, the vulnerability of the fever burning away, replaced by the cold, calculating intelligence that had built an empire.
"When our father died, he left everything to me. The business. The properties. The legacy. Marcus got a trust fund and a pat on the back. He smiled at the funeral, shook my hand, and spent the next ten years working his way into my inner circle. He played the loyal brother flawlessly."
Elena finished taping the clean bandage against his side, sitting back on her heels. The damp chill of the basement seeped through her jeans, but she barely felt it.
"So he betrayed you for money?" she asked softly.
Dominic let out a harsh, dry laugh that quickly turned into a wince of pain.
"Money is just paper, Elena. He betrayed me for power. He didn't just want my bank accounts. He wanted my life. He wants to be the king."
He leaned his head back against the concrete wall, closing his eyes.
"Three weeks ago, he invited me here to look at this property. A supposedly quiet investment away from the city. I came without my detail. It was a mistake. He had two men waiting. They shot me, beat me, and threw me down these stairs to bleed out in the dark."
Elena shivered, looking around the cavernous, rotting basement. "Why didn't he just kill you right away?"
Dominic opened his eyes, locking onto hers.
"Because I have dead-man switches on all the primary accounts and holding companies. If I die, the money evaporates into trusts he can't touch. He needed me missing, not dead. If I'm missing, as his closest living relative, he can legally seize control of the board in thirty days as my conservator. He left me down here to die slowly so he could control the timeline of discovering my body."
The sheer, sociopathic patience of the plan made Elena’s stomach turn.
"We have to go to the police," Elena urged, her maternal instinct to fix things overriding her fear.
"No." Dominic’s voice cracked like a whip in the small space. "Marcus owns the police commissioner. He owns half the judges in Boston. If you go to the cops, you are just handing me directly back to him, and he will kill you and your son to tie up the loose ends."
Elena’s blood ran cold. The threat from Marcus upstairs echoed in her mind. Your son’s school. Everything.
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"Then what do we do?" she whispered, terrified.
"We wait," Dominic said, a dark, terrifying determination settling over his bruised face. "You get me strong enough to walk out of this basement. And then, I take everything away from him."
