MAYA POV
The elevator ride takes forty-five seconds and climbs sixty-eight floors.
Maya counts them. She's been counting everything since the auction. The men in the car. The turns they made. The direction they drove. The time it took. Her mind is doing what it always does when she's afraid. It's filing information. It's building a map. It's preparing escape routes even though she knows there are none.
The elevator opens into a foyer that's bigger than her father's office.
Everything is glass and steel and the kind of expensive that whispers instead of shouts. The windows show Manhattan spreading out beneath them like a circuit board of lights. The city looks different from up here. Smaller. Less real. Like looking at someone's life from the outside when you can't touch it.
James Hart walks ahead of her. He's Dominic's right hand, the man who escorted her from the car. He has kind eyes, which somehow makes him more dangerous. She's learned that kindness is a weapon when you're smart enough to use it.
"This way," James says, gesturing down a hallway lined with art that probably costs more than most people's houses.
He opens a door to a bedroom in what he calls the east wing. The room is beautiful in a way that makes her want to scream. White walls. Modern furniture. A bed that looks like it was designed in a dream. A bathroom with a marble shower and towels so soft they feel like air.
And a closet filled with clothes in her exact size.
Her stomach twists.
Dominic didn't just bid on her at an auction. He prepared for her. He knew what he was buying. He knew her measurements, her preferences, her everything. This isn't random. This is calculated.
"Mr. Rossi requests that you rest," James says. His voice is apologetic, which tells her he knows what's about to happen. "He'll see you when he's ready."
He closes the door.
The lock clicks from the outside.
Maya doesn't move for a long moment. She just stands in the beautiful bedroom in her navy dress and listens to the sound of freedom disappearing. She hears James's footsteps fade down the hallway. She hears the elevator ding somewhere far away. She hears the city humming beneath her like it's alive and she's not.
She walks to the window and looks down at the people on the streets below. They're moving. They're walking to places. They're free.
She pulls a small notebook from her dress pocket. It's leather-bound, the kind she's carried since college. The kind her father doesn't know about. The kind where she's been writing things down for six years while pretending to be the perfect daughter who doesn't understand what he does.
She opens to a blank page and starts writing.
Two million dollars.Youngest godfather in New York.Consolidated power in eighteen months.Built empire through intelligence, not violence.
She pauses. Her pen hovers over the paper. She's heard her father talking on the phone when he thought she wasn't listening. She's pieced together information from news articles and overheard conversations. She knows Dominic Rossi is dangerous, but not in the way other crime bosses are dangerous.
Other crime bosses use violence to build empires.
Dominic uses his mind.
She writes faster now, her handwriting getting smaller as the information spills out.
Father Giovanni Rossi killed in bombing. Eight years ago. Restaurant explosion. Sunday dinner.
Brother Anthony Rossi. Also killed in the bombing.
Suspect: ordered the bombing himself after becoming godfather? No. Timeline doesn't match. Too young when he became leader. Someone else ordered it. Revenge? But against whom?
Her pen stops moving.
She looks at the notebook page and something cold slides down her spine. She's been analyzing her father's financial records since she was nineteen years old. She knows about the bombing. She knows about the payment. She knows about the shell companies and the intermediaries he used to hide the money trail.
She knows that her father paid someone to kill two people in a restaurant eight years ago.
What if Dominic knows that too?
What if that's why he bid two million dollars?
What if this isn't about leverage against her father for future business deals?
What if this is about something that happened eight years ago?
Maya sits down on the edge of the pristine white bed and forces herself to breathe. She writes three more pages before her hands start shaking. She writes down everything she knows about Dominic. Every fact. Every rumor. Every piece of information she's gathered from listening to her father's phone conversations in the past few hours before the auction.
The pen scratches across the paper and her mind races and her stomach twists and somewhere inside her chest, something cracks.
Her father didn't just sell her because he lost money gambling.
Her father sold her because someone was coming for him.
And that someone just paid two million dollars to take her.
She lies down on the beautiful bed in the beautiful room with the view of the city she can't reach and she doesn't cry. She's too smart to cry. She's too controlled to break down. Instead, she stares at the ceiling and thinks about her father's face in the basement.
How his hand dropped from her elbow like touching her was poison.
How he stepped away from her without looking back.
How he chose himself over her.
How he always chooses himself.
She falls asleep thinking about the bombing. Thinking about two people dying in a restaurant eight years ago. Thinking about whether they had families. Thinking about whether their families are still looking for justice.
Thinking about what Dominic Rossi wants from her besides information.
The morning light comes through the floor-to-ceiling windows and wakes her up.
Maya hasn't slept this long in years. Her body betrayed her. Her exhaustion won. She wakes up confused and disoriented and locked in a beautiful cage sixty-eight floors above the city.
Someone has been in the room while she slept.
On the nightstand next to the bed is a tray with breakfast. Fresh fruit. Croissants. Coffee still steaming in a delicate cup. The smell makes her nauseous because eating means accepting that this is real.
Next to the breakfast tray is a piece of paper with a handwritten message.
She recognizes the handwriting immediately. It's precise. It's controlled. It's the handwriting of someone who doesn't waste words.
"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."
Maya reads it three times.
The message isn't a threat. It's a statement of fact. It's the kind of thing someone says when they've already decided your fate and they're just giving you the courtesy of knowing what it is.
She looks at the closet and sees the black dress hanging there. It's expensive. It's elegant. It fits her perfectly.
Of course it does.
She walks to the window and looks down at the city again. The same people from yesterday are walking the same streets. The world is the same. But everything has changed.
Dominic Rossi didn't buy her to keep her.
He bought her to use her.
And the question that's going to determine whether she lives or dies is simple: who does he want her to help him destroy?
She already knows the answer.
It's her father.