Harper stumbled beside her, crying silently.
Dominic watched them vanish through a door marked for staff laundry.
A tunnel.
Old Vale houses were built with secrets, and Nathan had known all of them.
Dominic ran again.
This time he did not call for men. He did not wait for backup. He knew where the laundry tunnel ended—at the carriage house, beyond the formal garden, where the black SUVs were parked beneath bare winter trees.
He reached the lower corridor just as Claire emerged ahead of him.
“Claire.”
She stopped.
Harper stood in front of her, small and shaking, Claire’s pistol pressed lightly against her shoulder.
Dominic halted ten feet away.
Claire looked beautiful in the cold gray light. That was the worst of it. Her beauty had always been clean and expensive, a kind of armor polished by salons, schools, and old money. Now, with a child in front of her and a gun in her hand, she looked like a portrait that had begun to rot behind the frame.
“Let her go,” Dominic said.
Claire’s smile trembled. “You weren’t supposed to come home early.”
“That seems to be a theme today.”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t mock me.”
Harper’s lips quivered. “Mr. Dominic…”
Dominic kept his gaze on Claire. “Look at me, Harper. Only me.”
The child obeyed through tears.
“You’re going to be all right.”
Claire laughed softly. “You say that like you still decide what happens here.”
Dominic took one careful step.
Claire pressed the gun closer.
He stopped.
“What was the plan?” he asked. “Marry me, bury Nathan’s secrets, and take the empire when I died?”
Her face hardened.
“When you died?” she repeated. “Dominic, you were already dead. You just kept walking around making everyone afraid to say it.”
He studied her.
There was hatred in her voice, but not only hatred.
Grief.
“Who are you working for?” he asked.
Claire tilted her head. “You still think this is business.”
“It always is.”
“No,” she said. “This is family.”
The word landed strangely.
Dominic noticed then something he should have seen long before. The shape of her anger. The familiarity of it. The way she had never feared him the way others did. The way Nathan had introduced her two years ago, smiling too widely, calling her a miracle connection.
Claire’s eyes filled, but she did not cry.
“My mother’s name was Sofia Bellandi,” she said.
Dominic’s mind searched the past.
Bellandi.