Chapter 2 - The Soft Exterior
Ten minutes earlier, the drawing room had been a theater of calculated terror.
When Vivian had bypassed the biometric security gates using a military-grade descrambler stolen from her father’s armory, she had expected to find a fragile, terrified civilian cowering in the corner. For a year, Vivian had nursed a bitter, consuming obsession to destroy everything Dominic held dear. Since he had cut ties with her to marry Nora—an unassuming art restorer with ink-stained fingers and a quiet laugh—Vivian had plotted her revenge.
She had kicked open the drawing room doors while Nora was sitting by the window, sketching architectural details of an 18th-century altarpiece.
“Where is he?” Vivian had screamed, brandishing a concealed switchblade that snapped open with a sharp, metallic click. Her eyes were wide, manic, fueled by weeks of chemical stimulants and unbridled rage. “Where is your precious monster, little mouse? Does he know his little wife is nothing more than a stray he picked up off the street?”
Nora had looked up from her sketchpad. She hadn't screamed. She hadn't dropped her pencil.
She had simply observed Vivian with the detached curiosity of a botanist studying a particularly aggressive weed.
“You’re tracking mud on the Persian carpet,” Nora had said quietly.
Vivian had laughed, a harsh, unhinged sound. “I’m going to carve you up, you little bitch. I’m going to make sure Dominic comes home to something he can never fix.”
Vivian had lunged forward, knife raised, aiming a fast, diagonal slash meant to scar Nora’s face.
What Vivian didn't know—what no one in Dominic’s syndicate knew, because Dominic had deliberately kept her background buried beneath layers of sealed aliases and fabricated paper trails—was that Nora had spent four years working as a combat trauma nurse in field hospitals across Eastern Europe before moving to Boston to restore art. She knew the exact anatomical placement of every bone, artery, and nerve cluster in the human body.
She also knew how to take down an assailant weighing twenty pounds less than her without breaking a sweat.
As Vivian lunged, Nora had sidestepped with fluid, lethal grace, caught Vivian’s wrist, twisted it past its natural range with a sickening pop, and swept her legs out from under her with a textbook judo trip. Vivian had hit the marble-veined floor with a concussion-inducing thud. Before the syndicate princess could scream, Nora had planted her knee firmly between Vivian’s shoulder blades, wrenched the knife away, and casually tossed it into the fireplace.
When Beatrice the housekeeper had peeked around the door a moment later, weeping in terror, Nora had calmly asked her to hand over a sturdy fireplace poker just in case the intruder decided to try acrobatics.
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Now, standing in the ruined drawing room with Dominic staring at her in stunned silence, Nora exhaled a long breath and wiped her brow with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint streak of gray ash across her skin.
“She’s quite heavy, Dom,” Nora noted, nudging Vivian’s limp shoulder with the tip of her shoe. “And her vocabulary is shockingly limited for someone with such expensive clothes.”
