Chapter 7 - Blood and Confessions
The blackout was not an accident.
Two floors below, Dominic’s Zurich contact had successfully overridden the Drake’s emergency substation, executing the failsafe protocol Clara had engineered two years earlier for an emergency evacuation.
Muzzle flashes strobed through the dark like jagged lightning.
Dominic lunged forward, tackling Clara into the cover of a thick marble balustrade as bullets pulverized the stone above them. In the dark, Clara didn't need sight; she knew the floorplan of the Drake by heart. She leaned out, firing controlled three-round bursts toward the muzzle flashes across the mezzanine.
A scream followed. Then another.
"Move!" Dominic yelled, grabbing her hand and pulling her through the service door behind them into the hotel’s back stairwell.
They descended four flights in the pitch black, their boots echoing against the concrete, the sounds of shouting and gunfire fading above them. They burst through the ground-level emergency exit into the freezing Chicago alleyway.
Rain mixed with sleet stung their faces.
A black armored SUV sat idling at the curb, its headlights dark. The door opened from the inside; Dominic’s personal driver, a scarred veteran named Miller who had served Dominic for a decade, waved them in frantically.
"Boss! Get in!"
Dominic shoved Clara into the back seat, dove in behind her, and slammed the heavy door just as rounds pinged off the reinforced steel. Miller slammed the accelerator, tires smoking on the wet asphalt, rocketing the vehicle out onto Michigan Avenue.
Inside the cabin, the heavy silence returned.
Dominic leaned over Clara, his hands trembling violently as he reached for the first-aid kit mounted beside the window. "Hold still. Let me see it."
"Dominic, it's just a graze—"
"I said hold still!" His voice cracked with a terrifying mix of fury and anguish.
He cut away the rest of the ruined emerald silk, exposing the bloody furrow along her shoulder. His hands were covered in her blood, his own tuxedo torn at the elbows. He poured antiseptic over the wound; Clara hissed through her teeth, her fingers digging into the leather upholstery, but she didn't cry out.
Dominic applied pressure with a gauze pad, his eyes never leaving the wound, his chest heaving as if he had run twenty miles.
"You knew," he whispered, his head hanging low between his shoulders. "You knew who I was the entire time."
Clara looked out the tinted window at the blurred city lights rushing past. "I knew you were Marcus Vale’s heir. I came to Vale Consolidated to find the evidence that proved your family murdered my father."
"And instead?"
"Instead, I found out that you were drowning," she said softly, turning her grey eyes toward him. "I watched you carry the guilt of an empire you never asked to inherit. I watched you bleed for strangers. I watched you punish yourself every single day because you couldn't save everyone."
Dominic looked up at her, tears cutting through the soot on his cheeks.
"Why didn't you tell me about the scar?" he whispered. "Why didn't you tell me you were Sparrow?"
A sad, bitter smile touched Clara’s lips. "Because I wanted you to see *me*, Dominic. Not a ghost from your childhood. Not an obligation to atone for. I wanted you to trust Clara Bennett."
Her words sliced deeper than any bullet.
Dominic closed his eyes as a wave of self-loathing crashed over him.
*Do not confuse being useful with being important.*
He had thrown those words at her like stones, blind to the fact that she had been the only truly important thing in his entire existence.
"I am going to tear Anthony Mercer apart," Dominic said, his voice dropping into a register so dark it made the driver glance in the rearview mirror. "I am going to strip everything he owns, burn every account he touches, and put him in the ground where your father should have seen him rot."
Clara reached out, her cool, steady fingers wrapping around his bloodstained wrist.
"No, Dominic," she said firmly. "You aren't going to murder him. If you murder him, you become what your father was. You become what the city expects you to be."
Dominic looked at her hand on his wrist. "He tried to kill you twice, Clara."
"And he failed," she replied, her eyes burning with an unshakable fire. "We take his empire. We take his freedom. We expose him to the federal prosecutors, to the port authority, to the entire underworld. We take everything he stole from my father and from you."
Dominic stared at her, the madness in his chest slowly giving way to a profound, awe-struck reverence.
"How?" he asked.
May you like
Clara leaned back against the headrest, a razor-sharp smile cutting across her bruised face. "Because before you fired me, Mr. Vale... I backed up his entire offshore ledger onto a private server he can't touch."
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