Chapter 1 - The Distance Between Us
The rental car smelled faintly of stale coffee and industrial floor cleaner, a world away from the leather-and-cedar scent of Damian’s custom town cars. I kept my foot steady on the accelerator, watching the mile markers tick backward as we crossed the state line into Vermont. Burlington was still an hour away, tucked against the edge of Lake Champlain where the water looked like hammered steel under the low, bruised clouds.
My phone, lying face down in the passenger-side cup holder, had remained silent for the past forty miles. That terrified me more than a ringing screen would have.
Damian didn’t scream when things went wrong. Silence was his gear-shifting mechanism, the quiet drop in temperature before the avalanche. I knew the exact sequence of what was happening in our Manhattan penthouse right now. First, he would check the security logs. Then, he would call the private airstrip in Teterboro. When he realized our passports weren’t flagged and no commercial airline records matched our names, he would realize I had planned this with the deliberate, quiet precision of someone who had spent five years learning how an empire operated from the inside.
A small sigh came from the back seat.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. Sophie was stirring against the softness of her faded yellow blanket, her dark curls flattened against her cheek. Her little fist still clutched the gray ear of her stuffed rabbit.
"Mama?" she murmured, her voice thick with sleep.
"I'm right here, sweet girl," I said, keeping my tone light, stripping every trace of panic from my vocal cords. "Just driving. Go back to sleep."
"Where's Daddy?"
The question hit me right below the sternum, sharp and breathless. For three years, Damian had been the towering figure who tossed her toward the ceiling until she shrieked with laughter, the man who built her custom dollhouses in his spare hours when the board meetings were over. She didn't know about the closed doors downstairs, or the men in dark suits who stood in our foyer speaking in low, clipped tones about territory and leverage. To Sophie, her father was simply the sun that warmed the house.
"Daddy is working, baby," I said smoothly, easing the car around a sweeping curve in the highway. "We're going on a little vacation. Just the two of us."
She blinked her big, gray-blue eyes—the exact shade of Damian's—and rolled over, drifting back into sleep with a soft puff of breath.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I had told myself I was protecting her innocence, keeping her away from the corrosive gravity of Damian’s world. But as the miles stretched on, a cold, bitter thought crept into my mind: was I protecting her, or was I just running away because I didn't have the courage to look my husband in the eye and tell him he was a monster?
May you like
The answer didn't matter anymore. The miles were real. The silence from Manhattan was real. And somewhere behind me, the machinery of Damian Ashford’s life was turning toward our direction.
---
