Chapter 13 - The Crack in the Glass
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At six o’clock in the morning, back inside the heated master suite of the Oak Brook villa while Chloe slept soundly downstairs under the watchful eye of Dr. Rossini and twelve armed guards, Roman made good on half his threat: he refused to let Tessa out of his sight until she was warm.
After a steaming shower that washed the freezing Chicago River silt from her skin, Tessa stepped out into the master bedroom wearing one of Roman’s thick charcoal cashmere sweaters and wool socks, only to find him standing shirtless by the fireplace holding a blow-dryer he had clearly never operated in his life, frowning at the switches as if it were a foreign explosive device.
Despite everything they had survived in the last ten hours, a soft, genuine laugh escaped Tessa’s throat.
Roman looked up, his harsh features relaxing into a rare, devastatingly boyish half-smile that took ten years off his face. "Don't laugh. My mother used to make me sit by the fire for an hour when I fell through the pond ice at ten years old."
He tossed the blow-dryer onto the armchair, picked up a thick warm bath towel instead, and pulled her down onto the plush wool rug in front of the roaring fireplace between his knees, gently rubbing the damp ends of her chestnut hair dry himself.
Sitting there in the quiet dawn light with the heat of the fire on her face and the solid warmth of Roman Vane’s chest against her back, Tessa felt the last of the adrenaline fade into a deep, aching awareness of the man holding her.
For two years since her mother died and her sister got sick, she had carried the entire sky on her own fragile shoulders—terrified every single day that one dropped plate, one missed shift, or one bounced check would kill the little girl she loved most in the world.
Now, leaning back against the most feared man in Chicago, she felt completely, unshakably weightless.
When she turned her head to look up at him over her shoulder, Roman’s hands stilled in her hair. His gunmetal eyes dropped to her parted lips, then back up to her hazel eyes.
"Why did you really stand up for me at that dinner table last night, Roman?" she whispered softly. "Before you knew about my dad or the casino tower or your cousin. You had senators and billionaires at that table—and I was just a temp maid who ruined your carpet."
Roman’s large hand slid from her hair down to cup the side of her jaw, his thumb brushing gently across her lower lip.
"Because my grandmother came over from Palermo at nineteen and scrubbed floors in the Palmer House Hotel for six years while my grandfather worked the coal barges," Roman said quietly, his voice rough with a truth he never shared with the men in silk suits. "She told me when I was a boy that you can measure the size of a man in ten seconds by how he talks to the woman cleaning up his mess. When I looked down that table last night and saw you trying not to cry while holding your ground against Arthur Sterling with blood running down your hand... you were the only real thing in that room, Tessa."
Tessa’s breath caught as she turned fully around in his lap, her uninjured hand coming up to rest against his bare, scarred collarbone.
"Roman..." she whispered.
He bent his head and kissed her.
It was slow, deep, and achingly tender at first—his mouth warm and tasting of smoky bourbon as he slanted his lips over hers, careful of her bruised ribs and bandaged hand—until Tessa let out a soft sound in her throat and wound her arm around his neck, pressing herself flush against his bare chest.
A low groan vibrated deep in Roman’s throat. His arms locked around her waist, lifting her onto his thighs in front of the fire as the kiss turned hot, starving, and possessive, burning away the freezing dark of the river tunnel until neither of them could breathe.
When he finally tore his mouth from hers, resting his forehead against hers with his chest heaving, the grandfather clock in the hall chimed seven a.m.
"Four hours until the Gaming Commission walks into Arthur Sterling’s lobby," Roman rasped against her lips, his eyes dark and molten. "Get three hours of sleep in my bed. At eleven o’clock, we burn their house down."
At 10:55 AM, the sun shone brilliantly over the snow-covered concrete canyon of Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago.
Inside the soaring, three-story glass atrium lobby of the nearly completed Sterling Tower, Arthur Sterling stood in a bespoke navy overcoat surrounded by the five members of the Illinois Gaming Commission, Mayor Vance’s press secretary, and six live local television camera crews broadcasting the final site certification walkthrough.
Arthur had two dark bruises under his eyes from a sleepless night after Victor Vance had informed him that the third-floor hospital snatch had failed—but Victor had assured Arthur at dawn that his tunnel crew had opened the river floodgates at four a.m., drowning anyone who had gone down into Section 14, and that by noon today at the Aurelia Club, Roman Vane would be dead!
"As you can see, Commissioners," Arthur Sterling beamed into the live network microphones, gesturing grandly toward the sixty-foot central support columns of the main casino atrium, "Sterling Developments has spared no expense in engineering the safest, most structurally advanced two-billion-dollar entertainment complex in the Midwest!"
Right on cue, forty feet below the polished granite floor where Arthur Sterling was standing, the unreinforced eight-inch concrete cavity wall that had lost its hydrostatic support when the three steel drums were removed—and had been hammered for six hours by four hundred thousand gallons of high-pressure river water from the flooded freight tunnel Victor’s own men had opened—finally sheared under the weight of the eastern steel superstructure!
CRACK-BOOOOOM!
A sound like a cannon shot echoed up through the foundation pilings of the skyscraper.
Beneath the horrified eyes of the Gaming Commissioners and six live television cameras, a jagged, four-inch-wide fissure tore straight across the polished black granite lobby floor between Arthur Sterling’s feet—and three of the towering thirty-foot structural glass panels of the atrium facade exploded into a million glittering diamonds as the eastern column settled three inches into the hollow void!
Alarms wailed across the building as reporters, commissioners, and engineers screamed and stampeded for the street doors while live breaking-news chyrons flashed across every screen in Illinois:
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BREAKING: STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE AT STERLING CASINO TOWER DURING LIVE COMMISSION INSPECTION!
And right as Arthur Sterling stumbled out onto the Wacker Drive sidewalk into the blinding flashbulbs, his phone buzzed with an anonymous text message containing a single photo: three stainless-steel carfentanil drums sitting in the back of a black truck heading straight for the Aurelia Club.
