The Patriot (Dominion Hall #13)

Chapter 1

AMELIA

Ishould’ve been somewhere dusty.

Somewhere loud, somewhere raw, somewhere that smelled of diesel and adrenaline and the kind of fear that made my heart race like no ballroom ever could.

Instead, I was in Charleston, South Carolina, of all places—humid, polished, drowning in magnolia-scented air—standing under a chandelier that probably cost more than a year of the freelance contracts I scraped together.

My dress clung to the back of my legs. Jet lag pulled at the corners of my vision like fingers. And every pore on my body had decided to remind me I wasn’t built for the Southeast.

Especially not in formal wear.

Ugh.

I tugged at the neckline of the gown I’d borrowed from a friend. “You’ll look perfect,” she’d said. “Gala-appropriate.”

Right now, all I wanted was cargo pants, a press vest, and a backpack full of recording equipment.

Sixteen hours ago, I’d been on a transport plane sitting between two Marines who smelled like dust and exhaustion. Now, I was surrounded by Charleston’s political elite swirling around each other with champagne flutes and curated smiles.

A different battlefield.

One I disliked far more.

My heels clicked across polished marble as I stepped further into the grand rotunda of Mayor Natalie Kennedy’s charity gala—an event I normally would’ve avoided at all costs, if not for the tip burning a hole in my mind.

Charleston-based ex-military billionaires with political reach.

Leaked documents.

Potential corruption.

A story that smelled too good to ignore.

I’d landed at Charleston International four hours earlier, sweated straight through my blouse while waiting for my rental car, and spent the drive downtown trying not to fall asleep at the wheel.

I’d checked into the Embassy Suites in the historic district—a practical choice, nothing too fancy, the kind of place where journalists and government staffers could blend in without raising eyebrows.

It had seemed like a good spot to stay under the radar.

The hotel shower had helped. Barely.

What I needed was sleep.

The mayor stood near the stage greeting donors, radiant in a deep green gown that made her golden hair gleam under the lights. She laughed with a senator, then leaned into her fiancé who, even from across the room, radiated former-military, current-dangerous energy.

He looked like a man who’d never once been told no.

I sipped water instead of wine. I needed my head clear.

The tipster’s voice echoed in my thoughts.

You want the real story? Start with Charleston. Follow the money. Follow the soldiers who didn’t stay soldiers. There’s a web down there, Emerson. Bigger than you think.

I hadn’t asked for names. Sources rarely gave them. But I had been given a phrase:

Dominion Hall.

It meant nothing to me yet, except that it had been spoken with the kind of reverence normally reserved for holy sites or classified installations.

And when I’d tried to dig deeper before getting on the plane?

Nothing.

A near-total blackout.

Every search for Dominion Hall had led to the same eerie conclusion: A handful of tax records, a few society-page mentions, and then … silence.

Like someone had gone through with digital bleach and scrubbed the internet clean.

It was odd.

More than odd.

Wrong.

That was why I’d taken the assignment.

Because if there was one thing I trusted after a decade in the field, it was that some stories could only be uncovered on the ground.

It was what they’d drilled into us at Columbia Journalism School, back when I believed truth was a bright, shining thing you could dig out of the dirt if you worked hard enough.

My mentors—Professor Caplan with her razor-edged ethics lectures, and Robert Knight, the foreign correspondent who’d once smuggled film out of Caracas in his shoe—taught me the kind of integrity that didn’t bend, even when the world did.

Sometimes, it felt like I was a dying breed for holding onto that.

But I wasn’t here to fabricate a scandal or hunt shadows for sport.

I was here because when powerful men erased their own footprints, it usually meant the ground beneath them was unstable.

And now?

Standing in a ballroom filled with men whose posture, tailored suits, and quiet intensity told me everything my source couldn’t—

I felt it in my bones.

There was a story here. And someone did not want it told.

A woman in sequins brushed past me and offered a polite, sugary smile—the kind Southern women seemed to master from birth. I tried to return it, but my face didn’t work that way.

“Where’re you visiting from?” she asked, the way someone might ask about a vacation.

I froze for half a second. My vowels didn’t match hers, or the room’s, and I’d known it the minute I stepped inside.

“D.C.,” I said. That was the easy answer. Safe. Neutral. Expected at an event like this.

But she tilted her head. “I knew it. No accent.”

I smiled tightly. “Just the boring kind.”

She laughed and disappeared into the crowd before I could think of something clever to say.

I exhaled. Great. Already pegged as an outsider.

Not hard, considering most of Charleston’s socialites could trace their roots back five generations and probably had silver spoons monogrammed with their family crests.

Truth was, whatever hint of a Canadian lilt I’d once had had been ironed out years ago—filed smooth by living out of bags in half a dozen countries and interviewing people whose accents shifted with the wind and borders.

Spend enough time around the world, and your own voice becomes a blend of everywhere and nowhere at once. A kind of neutral shell.

I lifted my chin, forcing myself to blend in. Shoulders relaxed. Mouth soft. Hands loosely holding the stem of my water glass. A woman who belonged here, or could, at least, pretend she did.

Funny—I could slip unnoticed into a tent full of soldiers, move through a refugee camp without drawing questions, blend into places where everyone guarded their lives with silence.

War zones had a way of leveling people; danger didn’t care about accents, lineage, or designer gowns.

Blending in there was about reading the room, respecting the culture, knowing when to speak and when to keep your head down.

Here?

Here, it felt like I was wearing a neon sign.

Maybe because my body buzzed with the wrong kind of awareness—not fear, but restlessness.

It had been too long since I’d been touched. Too long since I’d let someone—anyone—close enough to quiet the hum under my skin. Combat zones didn’t exactly lend themselves to romance, unless one counted adrenaline-fueled mistakes inside fortified bunkers.

Charleston, apparently, was crawling with the kind of men who hit every one of my inconvenient triggers. Military. Broad shoulders. Quiet, lethal confidence. The kind of men I told myself I wasn’t attracted to anymore, because I’d learned the hard way what loving a soldier did to a woman.

Still, my pulse responded without my permission whenever one of them passed.

God, I needed to get out of this city before my hormones and my career collided in a disaster.

My gaze snagged on a group of men near the corner—tall, suited, assessing. Maybe brothers, though the sheer number of them made that unlikely. But there was something shared in their posture, in the way they occupied space like they’d been trained for it.

A man bumped my shoulder as he passed and murmured an apology. His accent was thick Lowcountry, his cologne expensive, his posture unmistakably military.

My stomach fluttered—irritation or attraction, it was hard to tell. Both pulled at me with equal strength.

I dragged in a breath, reminding myself why I was here.

Not for them.

Not for anyone.

For the story.

For the truth buried somewhere in this city’s polished surface.

Truth had always been my compass.

Maybe it was growing up in a small Canadian town where everyone knew your business.

Rumors spread like wildfire in winter, when people were bored and snowed in, and I learned early that lies could rot a place from the inside out.

My mother used to say honesty was the one thing you gave yourself, not anyone else.

Live clean, she told me. Even when the world doesn’t.

I carried that with me.

Still did.

Still fought for it in a profession offering less and less of it. Sometimes, it felt like I was clinging to a dying religion—insisting on integrity in a world that rewarded spin and spectacle. But I couldn’t stop. Not when the truth still mattered to someone. Even if that someone was only me.

I moved toward the edge of the ballroom, pretending to study the silent-auction tables while stealing another look at the cluster of men in the corner. They laughed at something—low, masculine, controlled. One of them gestured with a glass, revealing a scar that ran along the side of his hand.

A story.

Every soldier had one. Most didn’t tell it.

A voice in my head whispered that I could be on a flight tomorrow, back to the desert, back to the dust and risk and honesty of people living on the edge of survival.

I missed it—missed the clarity of danger, missed the instant purpose that came with stepping out of a Humvee and knowing my presence mattered.

Here?

I was another woman in a dress, sweating under a chandelier.

Someone brushed past me again, this time a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a friendly smile.

“Excuse me, ma’am—are you enjoying yourself?”

His politeness was unmistakably Southern, but his eyes flicked over me with curiosity—the kind that made my ribs tighten.

Am I enjoying myself?

In this humidity?

In this humidity while wearing shapewear?

“I’m still taking it all in,” I said lightly.

“Your first gala here?”

“My first anything here.”

He chuckled. “You’ll get used to the heat, I promise.”

“I’d rather not be here long enough to try.”

He blinked, surprised, then laughed again before heading off. No threat. Just talk. But it reminded me of what the woman earlier had noticed: my accent—or lack of one—made me stand out.

I adjusted my posture again, lowering my voice when I ordered another water from a passing server, mimicking the languid cadence of the room without mocking it. I didn’t need attention. I needed invisibility.

I drifted through the crowd, letting conversations drift over me—political gossip, business deals, effortless charm layered with the kind of power that had probably destroyed as many careers as it built.

Everywhere I turned, men with military posture glided through the room like they owned it. Their hands steady. Their eyes sharp. Their presence heavy.

Maybe that was why my skin tingled every time one passed. That old, stupid ache. That inconvenient craving. The reminder that I’d spent too many years surrounded by those men—and I still wasn’t immune.

Not by a long shot.

I took a slow sip of water, letting the coolness ground me.

I wasn’t here to get tangled up with anyone.

I wasn’t here to let my guard down.

I wasn’t even here socially.

I was here because someone had whispered the words Dominion Hall like a warning.

Or a clue. And if half the tension in this room was connected to that name, then I needed to tread lightly.

A hand brushed my elbow and I jumped, instinct flaring.

A young server blanched. “S-sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s fine,” I said quickly, forcing a smile. “Jet lag.”

He nodded and scurried off, leaving me alone at the edge of the dance floor.

My pulse hadn’t quite settled.

God, I needed to get out of here before I lost my mind.

And yet … something in me stayed rooted.

Drawn.

Hooked by the edges of danger in the air.

Because beneath the laughter and the floral arrangements and the smooth jazz, I sensed it—

An undercurrent.

A watchfulness.

A quiet, coiled power.

Something was happening here.

And I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what—and why.