Her Dark Protector (Halo City Protectors #5)

Chapter 1

Vivi

The penthouse still smells like Dominic.

It’s been three weeks since the funeral and I can't get rid of the smell of cedar and cigarettes.

I've opened every window. I've had the housekeeper come twice.

I burn candles on the kitchen counter until the wax pools black and the scent underneath is still him, still there, still refusing to be finished.

I'm in the study — Dominic's study, technically, though I've been dismantling him from it one careful object at a time, the slow archaeology of becoming a person again after a decade of being someone's wife.

I sit at the desk with a glass of Barolo I'm not drinking, going through the foundation's quarterly reports because someone has to, because Dominic's name is still on the letterhead and will be until I have the legal bandwidth to change it, and I look up for no reason I can name.

The window at the far end of the room is open two inches.

I did not open it.

The city breathes through the gap — exhaust and salt air and the distant percussion of Halo City at night.

That window was closed when I came in here.

I set down the glass, stand, and do not go to the window.

I check the room instead, the way Dominic always laughed at me for, the habit I built in the first year of our marriage when I finally understood what kind of man I'd married and what kind of world came attached to him.

The study. The hall. The master bedroom with its California king I now sleep dead center in, finally, after years of keeping to my side.

The guest rooms. The kitchen. The second bathroom.

Nothing.

No one.

I go back to the study and cross to the sill. The latch is intact. It was not broken or forced. When I look down at the ledge I find it there.

Card stock, cream. The kind that comes in boxes of fifty from a stationer on the Pier that Dominic favors. Favored. His preferred weight. His preferred finish.

One word on it, in his handwriting.

Vivienne.

***

I call my lawyer first. In Dominic's world you call the lawyer before anyone else, because the lawyer decides what comes next and whether it needs to stay quiet. Marco Elia picks up on the second ring, which tells me his insomnia is as bad as mine.

"There's been a break-in," I say.

A pause. "Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Is anyone there?"

"No. They left something." I look at the card stock on the desk, where I've set it without touching the edges. "A note. In Dominic's handwriting."

Silence, longer this time. "Vivienne."

"I know."

"Dominic is dead."

"I know that, Marco."

"His handwriting?"

"I know what it means." I know what it means when someone wants you to understand they can reach you, know the particular grammar of a warning sent ahead of the real message.

What I don't know is what Dominic could possibly have left behind that anyone would want badly enough to come here for.

"Someone had access to his stationery. Someone practiced his signature, or paid someone who could.

They wanted me to know they'd been here. "

"We need to involve HPG," Marco says.

I'd expected that. Halo Protective Group handled Dominic's event security, his occasional quiet situations, and the annual foundation gala. I know the name. I know the building on Meridian. It’s the kind of place that looks like a tech firm until you notice the men in the lobby and reconsider.

I don't want bodyguards. I don't want someone reorganizing my days, occupying my space, reporting my movements back to someone else.

I've spent ten years in a marriage that did all of those things to me, and I'm only just beginning to understand what it feels like to move through a room without permission.

I don’t want it. But I’m not stupid. “Fine," I say.

***

The Glasshouse is exactly what it sounds like.

The next day, Marco has arranged an intake meeting.

The ops floor runs on mirrored surfaces and live feeds and the low constant hum of equipment, and three men at workstations look up when I walk in and then look immediately back at their screens without comment. Professional courtesy. I recognize it.

A woman at the front desk walks me to a glass-walled conference room overlooking the floor. I sit, put my bag on the table, fold my hands, and wait.

I've built a picture in my head of what the head of close protection will look like. HPG runs white-glove — city elite, good suits, the brand of discreet that requires a certain kind of polish. Precise, managed, the kind of professional danger that comes sheathed in good manners.

The man who walks in looks like a problem I haven't planned for.

Dark hair, jaw cut like steel. The suit is charcoal and well-fitted. He is broad through the shoulders, long through the legs, every detail of him is masculine and flawless. I feel a flush of pure irritation at myself for every one of them.

I’m a widow. Recently. I should not be noticing him.

He crosses the room and stops at the chair across from mine without sitting. His eyes are dark and steady and move over the room fast, thorough, landing finally on me and staying there.

Men look at me a certain way. The quick inventory: threat, asset, ornament, problem. This is something else entirely — slower, carrying intention behind it, registering less like an assessment and more like a conclusion he's already reached before he walked through the door.

I keep my expression neutral and remind myself that I'm here because someone broke into my home, and that Caden Byrne's cheekbones have no bearing on any of it.

"Mrs. Ferraro." His voice is low and even. "Caden Byrne. Head of close protection."

"I know who you are," I say, "and I know why I'm here. Skip the part where you tell me how serious this is."

He smirks softly to himself. "Tell me about the note," he says.

So I tell him. I've spent the night organizing everything into something deliverable, aware that every unnecessary word is a crack in the composure I'm holding together with both hands.

The window. The stationery. The handwriting.

The fact that nothing was taken, which is its own kind of message.

I tell him about my late-husband Dominic the way you summarize a thing you've learned to stop feeling — Valenti Consortium, mid-level lieutenant, legitimate property businesses running alongside things I've learned not to look at directly, killed three weeks ago in what the police are calling an inter-syndicate dispute.

Byrne listens without notes, without interruption, with that steady weighted attention I can't categorize, and when I finish he lets the silence run for two beats past comfortable.

"You don't think it's the Consortium?”.

"No."

"Because they'd have sent someone more final."

"Because Dominic was theirs," I say. "They don't warn a lieutenant's widow. It doesn't fit the message." I pause. "Someone thinks he told me something before he died."

"Did he?"

"No." I hold his gaze. "We were not that kind of marriage."

He watches me with an expression I can't entirely read, which is unusual — eight years in rooms full of dangerous men has given me a reliable fluency in the language of their silences, and I can generally tell safe from danger across a dinner table without much effort.

This one I can't place.

"I don't want a shadow," I say. "I just want to know who sent that note and why. I want the problem solved, not managed."

"You can want whatever you like," he says, flat and certain, in a tone that makes it clear my preferences have been noted and will have no particular impact on what happens next. "I'll need to sweep the penthouse tonight."

***

Byrne arrives with one other man, who sweeps the building exterior and the service entrance and leaves. Byrne takes the penthouse himself.

I watch him work. He's thorough in a way that's almost meditative and the whole time his face stays neutral and focused and he speaks only when he needs something from me. Which door? Which window? Has this lock always stuck?

I answer and stay out of his way. I tell myself I'm not watching the way he moves through my apartment, the particular quality of his attention on every surface he touches.

The sweep takes forty minutes. He finishes in the kitchen.

I pour two glasses of whiskey without thinking and set one on the counter beside him and take the other to the far side of the island.

He looks at the glass. Then at me.

I don't explain it. I don't have an explanation. I pick up mine and drink.

After a moment, he picks up his.

"Someone had a key," he says, "or knew the building well enough to not need one. The study window latch shows wear consistent with repeated use."

"So they've been in before."

"Possibly. Or someone with building access — staff, a service contractor — gave them what they needed." He turns the glass once on the counter without drinking. "Your husband had people who came and went regularly?"

"Yes."

"I'll need a list."

"Marco can get you one."

He nods. He's standing on the other side of the island, maybe four feet away, and the kitchen light catches the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders, and I become suddenly, inconveniently aware that I'm alone in my apartment at night with a man who looks like that.

I've spent my adult life in rooms with dangerous men. I know how to go still in those rooms, how to take up no space and offer nothing and simply wait until the temperature drops. My body knows the drill.

But this man makes me feel different. I notice a low pull of heat moving through me without asking permission, without caring that I buried a husband three weeks ago or that someone wants me dead or that this particular man is here in a strictly professional capacity.

I haven't felt anything like it in years.

Possibly I've never felt it for someone I've known less than twelve hours, and I'm going to have to live with that information regardless of what I do with it.

I'm not interested.

My body doesn't care.

He looks up from the glass and catches me looking. I hold it. So does he.

"I'll be back tomorrow at seven," he says. "I want to go through the study more thoroughly."

"Fine."

He drinks and sets the glass down. "Lock the study window from the inside tonight. The latch works. It just hasn't been used."

"I know how to lock a window."

"I know you do." He picks up his jacket from the chair back, moves toward the door, and stops without turning. "Mrs. Ferraro." He sees himself out.

I am left alone in silence.