Part 2
The rain swallowed the cathedral behind us.
One moment, I was standing beneath vaulted ceilings with Julian’s fingerprints burning beneath my sleeve. The next, Dante Romano’s coat was around my shoulders, warm with the scent of cedar smoke and storm air, and Chicago blurred beyond the wet glass of his Rolls-Royce.
I stared down at the papers in my lap.
My father’s signature.
Miles’s name.
A price.
Not a metaphor. Not some cruel family bargain dressed up as sacrifice.
An actual price.
Two million dollars.
My fingers shook so badly the documents whispered against one another.
Dante sat beside me in silence. He had not touched me since helping me into the car. His bodyguard drove. Another car followed close behind us like a shadow.
“What is this?” I asked.
My voice sounded nothing like mine.
Dante looked at the envelope, then at me.
“A purchase agreement.”
My stomach turned.
“For me?”
His jaw tightened.
“For Miles.”
The city lights fractured in the rain outside, turning every window into broken gold.
I tried to read the words again, but they crawled across the page like insects. Medical transfer. Legal authority. Experimental treatment access. Crowe Family Foundation. Whitmore consent.
“No,” I whispered. “Miles is seventeen.”
“Which means your father could still sign on his behalf.”
“But sell him?” I looked up, barely breathing. “You said purchase agreement.”
Dante’s eyes were cold, but his voice stayed quiet.
“Julian’s foundation has been moving patients through illegal trials. Desperate families. Unapproved drugs. False recovery reports. Some patients got better. Some vanished from the records.”
A sound left me before I could stop it.
Miles, with his pale face and stubborn smile.
Miles, who told the nurses jokes so they would not see him cry.
Miles, who still believed our father was trying.
“No,” I said again, as if the word could undo ink.
Dante leaned forward.
“Your father owed the Crowes more than money. Julian agreed to erase the debt if you married him and Miles was placed under his foundation’s care.”
My heart beat so hard it hurt.
“The treatment Julian promised…”
“Was the cage,” Dante said.
I closed my eyes.
I remembered my father sitting at Miles’s bedside, smoothing a blanket over his thin legs while cameras flashed for a charity article. I remembered him telling me, Serena, sometimes family requires sacrifice.
I had thought he meant me.
He had meant both of us.