Chapter 1 - The Weight of Velvet
Vanessa Moretti slipped her champagne glass onto a passing tray without taking her eyes off the man near the ballroom doors.
He wasn't watching her.
That was why she noticed him.
At the Grand Ashford, nearly everyone watched Vanessa eventually. Politicians admired her manners. Donors remembered her laugh. Men who feared Damien Moretti tended to look at his wife with the relieved affection people reserved for beautiful things that posed no danger.
Vanessa had spent three years making that assumption easy.
Across the ballroom, Damien stood with three senior men from his organization, broad shoulders beneath a charcoal dinner jacket, his expression controlled enough to make powerful people wonder what he knew that they didn't. Beside him stood Luca Bellini—Damien's lieutenant, his friend, the man who had spent eleven years close enough to know which doors Damien used, which guards he trusted, and which messages would make him leave a crowded room alone.
Luca glanced at Vanessa and murmured something. Damien answered without looking away from her. Vanessa couldn't hear the words, but she recognized the fond little tilt of Damien's mouth. He was defending her again. Sweet Vanessa. Civilian Vanessa. The wife he kept safely outside the uglier rooms.
Three years earlier, Damien had met a poised woman at a charity auction and decided her warmth meant innocence. He had never been cruel about it. That almost made it worse. He thought protecting her meant deciding what she shouldn't have to know. Vanessa had allowed him to believe it because, for the first time in her adult life, being underestimated had felt peaceful.
Tonight it stopped feeling peaceful.
A server approached Damien during dessert and passed him a folded note. Vanessa saw Luca notice. More importantly, she saw Luca not react. Damien read the message, spoke briefly to his men, then crossed toward the private staircase beside the ballroom—alone.
Vanessa excused herself, walked to the side corridor, and climbed to the third floor. The music below faded into a distant pulse.
There, she encountered the first fake guard. When he lowered his gaze to her diamond stilettos, Vanessa slipped one off, used his momentum to drive him into the wall, and brought the sharp metal heel down on his neck. A second attacker rounded the corner; she closed the distance, disarmed him, and stripped his pistol.
A muffled shot echoed from behind the lounge door.
Vanessa kicked the door open. Inside, furniture was overturned, glass was shattered, and Damien was bleeding from his left shoulder. Luca stood twenty feet away, holding a black protective case.
When an attacker mocked her, asking what she’d do with her remaining shoe, Vanessa threw it straight into his face, took down three men with precise, lethal hand-to-hand combat, and caught Damien as his knees buckled.
"Who are you?" Damien gasped, bleeding into her gown.
May you like
"Your wife," Vanessa said. She pressed a pistol into his hand, handed him off to the leather chair, and locked eyes with him. "Stay alive. I'll get back what he stole."
She turned and sprinted through the service door after Luca.
