Chapter 2 - The Rearranged Mansion
The poker felt uncomfortably heavy as my arms began to tremble, not from fear now, but from the sudden, jarring realization that I was standing in the foyer of a notorious organized crime figure, threatening him with fire-tending equipment.
"Oh," I breathed, the iron slipping an inch downward. "The... owner."
"Indeed," Dominic said, stepping past the poker with casual indifference that made my skin prickle. He didn't disarm me. He simply walked around me toward the grand staircase, pausing only when he caught sight of the formal receiving parlor to the right.
He stopped dead.
I turned slowly, following his gaze. That was when I remembered.
Earlier that afternoon, driven by a combination of insomnia and an acute irritation at the way the previous interior designer had positioned the eighteenth-century French settees, I had completely rearranged the formal parlor. The heavy velvet sofas had been shifted to face the courtyard instead of the blank dark wall; the oversized Regency mirrors had been swapped to catch the morning light; and three massive oil paintings of scowling Caruso ancestors had been relocated to the dark hallway where they wouldn't give guests night terrors.
Dominic stared into the parlor. The space looked entirely different—warmer, more balanced, breathing with an accidental intimacy that a mafia boss’s museum-piece estate had never possessed.
My heart hammered against my ribs. He's going to fire me. He's going to throw me out into the freezing rain.
Dominic walked slowly into the parlor, his fingers brushing the back of a rearranged velvet armchair. He stood in silence for a long, agonizing minute, looking at the way the room now flowed.
"You moved the portraits of my grandfather's uncles," he said finally, without turning around.
"They were brooding in the dark," I blurted out defensively, tightening my grip on the poker again. "And the lighting in this room is terrible for heavy portraits. They belong in a corridor where shadows suit them. This room needed air."
Dominic turned slowly. In the dim overhead light, his expression was completely unreadable.
"Air," he repeated, tasting the word. He looked at me, a strange, searching glint in his dark eyes. "Nobody has ever accused this house of having air, Miss Vance. Most people who walk through these doors are too terrified to touch a cushion, let alone redesign my ancestral floor plan."
"I'm good at my job," I muttered, lowering the poker entirely. "And your interior decorator has a profound lack of spatial imagination."
Dominic let out a short, sharp sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh. He turned back toward the main hall, but as he did, his foot caught the edge of a heavy Persian rug I had pulled slightly askew to accommodate the new sofa alignment.
The rug bunched up, sliding across the polished oak floorboards beneath it with an odd, hollow metallic rattle.
May you like
Dominic froze. Leo stepped forward instantly, his hand back near his coat.
I stared at the spot where the rug had shifted. Beneath it, a brass floor plate, half-hidden by the baseboard, gleamed in the dim light.
