Chapter 7 - The Sins of the Past
By morning, the cabin felt less like a fortress and more like a sanctuary. I had contacted Carlo on an encrypted satellite phone, ordering him to mobilize our most loyal men and prepare for a hostile takeover of my own empire. But I knew Vincenzo would be hunting us, and he had the endless resources of my bank accounts to do it.
I was sitting at the wooden dining table, cleaning and reassembling my weapons, when Harper walked into the room. She had found some fresh clothes in the emergency supplies—an oversized flannel shirt and jeans that hung loosely on her frame.
She poured a cup of coffee and sat across from me. For the first time, I truly looked at her. Beneath the exhaustion and the fear, she possessed a quiet, striking beauty. But I also noticed the faint, fading bruises on her wrists and the delicate scar along her collarbone.
"The man who did that to you," I gestured to the scar, my voice laced with a dangerous edge. "Your ex-boyfriend. The one in debt to the loan sharks."
Harper flinched slightly, wrapping her hands around the warm coffee mug. "Marcus. He... he wasn't always like that. But the gambling addiction changed him. When he owed fifty thousand to the Rossi family, he panicked. He tried to force me to sell my car, my grandmother’s jewelry. When I refused, he... he threw me against the wall."
Her voice broke, tears welling in her eyes as she remembered the night she lost her daughter.
"The doctors said the blunt force trauma caused a placental abruption," she whispered, a single tear escaping. "Mia didn't stand a chance. Marcus ran before the police even arrived. I haven't seen him since."
A dark, violent fury ignited in my chest. In my world, men who laid hands on pregnant women were subjected to tortures that made death look like a mercy.
"The Rossi family is allied with Vincenzo," I realized aloud, the pieces of a terrifying puzzle clicking into place. "If Marcus owes them money, Vincenzo will use that debt. He will offer to wipe the slate clean if Marcus helps track you down. Does he have any way of finding you?"
Harper’s eyes widened in sheer panic. "My phone. I left it in the maid’s quarters at the estate, but... we share a cloud account. If I logged into anything, if there’s a tracker..."
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I cursed under my breath. "The SUV. When you connected your phone to the Bluetooth a few weeks ago to listen to music while cleaning it... the vehicle's GPS synced to your device."
Vincenzo didn't need to find me. He just needed to follow Marcus’s digital leash.
