Chapter 3 - The Private Room at L’Étoile
L’Étoile was the kind of restaurant where the menus didn't have prices, the waiters spoke in hushed, reverent tones, and the lighting was dim enough to hide secrets. When Declan and Sienna walked in, the host immediately bowed his head, bypassing the crowded main dining room and leading them through a set of arched mahogany doors into an intimate private salon overlooking the twinkling lights of downtown Minneapolis.
A roaring fire crackled in the stone hearth, casting a warm, amber glow across the white linen tablecloth.
Sienna didn't sit down immediately. She stood by the window, watching the sleet turn to heavy snowflakes against the glass.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Declan asked, standing near the table, his hands resting lightly on the back of a velvet-upholstered chair. “A glass of wine? Sparkling water?”
“Water is fine,” she said without turning around.
Declan signaled the waiter with a subtle nod, and within moments, crystal glasses were filled and the menus were left on the table before the staff vanished silently, closing the heavy oak doors behind them.
Silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating.
Finally, Declan pulled out her chair. “Sienna. Please. Sit.”
She turned slowly, her eyes narrowing as she walked over and took a seat, keeping her coat on as if she were prepared to bolt at any second. Declan took his seat opposite her, resting his arms on the table.
“Well?” Sienna prompted, her voice like shards of ice. “The clock is ticking. You wanted to explain seven years of silence. I’m listening.”
Declan exhaled slowly, looking down at his water glass before raising his dark eyes to meet hers.
“Seven years ago, on the night before I disappeared,” Declan began, his voice steady, though a muscle feathered in his jaw, “my father’s business partners approached me. Or rather, they cornered me.”
Sienna scoffed softly. “Your father was a high school history teacher who died when we were teenagers, Declan. What business partners?”
“My father lied to me,” Declan said quietly.
Sienna stopped breathing. The words hung in the warm air, ridiculous and impossible. “What did you say?”
“My father wasn't a history teacher,” Declan continued, his gaze unwavering. “That was an alias. A protective custody identity he assumed after testifying against the Syndicate—the Moretti-Vance criminal enterprise operating out of Chicago and the Upper Midwest. He lived in hiding for twenty years. And when I turned twenty-two, they found him.”
Sienna stared at him, the cold logic of her nurse’s brain instantly searching for signs of a psychiatric break, a delusion, a script from a bad crime thriller. But Declan’s face was carved from absolute, terrifying reality.
“That’s... that’s insane,” she whispered. “You’re making this up. You’re telling me some mob movie story to justify walking out on me?”
“I wish to God I were,” Declan said, leaning forward, his voice cracking with a raw, buried anguish. “The night before I left, three men broke into our apartment while you were asleep at your mother’s house in St. Paul. They put a gun to my head. They told me that if I stayed in your life—if I married you, if I built a future with you—they would kill you and everyone you loved to send a message to my father’s bloodline.”
Sienna’s hands began to shake. She gripped the edge of the mahogany table, her knuckles whitening.
“You’re lying,” she breathed, though the conviction in her voice was beginning to fray at the edges. “If that were true... if someone threatened me... why didn't you come to the police? Why didn't you wake me up? We could have run together!”
“To where?” Declan shot back, his voice rising slightly before he reined it in, his chest heaving. “They had men inside the local precinct, inside the federal bureaus, inside every institution you can name. If I went to the police, you would have been flagged as a target within the hour. The only way to keep you safe—the only way to convince them that I had completely cut ties with my past and didn't care about anyone—was to walk away cold. To disappear completely, without a trace, and let them think I was a selfish coward who abandoned his college girlfriend.”
The room seemed to spin.
Sienna felt a crushing weight settle over her chest, stealing the air from her lungs. Seven years of hatred, of bitter tears, of sleepless nights cursing his name, of telling herself that she was better off alone—all of it rested on a foundation built to protect her from a nightmare she hadn't even known existed.
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“You let me hate you,” she whispered, tears finally spilling over her lashes, hot and blinding. “You let me spend years wondering what was wrong with me, why I wasn't enough for you to stay... while you were playing a deadly game in the shadows?”
“I died every single day I was away from you, Sienna,” Declan said, his voice breaking as he reached across the table, his hand hovering inches from hers, terrified to touch her. “Every day. I didn't have a choice. If I had contacted you, even once, their surveillance would have picked it up. You would have been dead before the week was out.”
