Chapter 2 - FOUR MONTHS LATER
The first gunshot missed Layla by less than an inch.
Concrete dust burst across her face as she crouched behind the pillar. Patrick Doyle lay on the garage floor, one hand pressed against his chest while blood spread between his fingers.
The masked men separated.
One moved left.
The other moved right.
They knew how to hunt someone who had nowhere to run.
Layla clutched the envelope beneath her coat and searched the garage for anything that could become a weapon. A tire iron lay near the rear wheel of Patrick's sedan, but reaching it meant crossing six feet of open pavement.
Her babies moved inside her.
The sensation was still small then, more flutter than kick, but it transformed fear into something harder.
She could die frightened.
She could not die passive.
Layla grabbed an empty glass bottle from beside the pillar and hurled it toward a parked motorcycle.
The bottle shattered.
The alarm screamed.
Both men looked toward the sound.
Layla ran.
She reached the tire iron, swung it with both hands, and struck the nearest man across the wrist. His pistol skidded beneath a car.
He cursed and grabbed her coat.
Layla drove her knee upward.
He folded with a groan.
The second man raised his weapon.
A black sedan came through the garage entrance too fast, tires shrieking across the polished floor. It slammed into the attacker's legs and crushed him against a concrete divider.
Vincent Crane stepped out before the car stopped moving.
He fired twice.
The man holding Layla released her and fell.
Silence returned in fragments.
The motorcycle alarm continued to wail.
Patrick coughed blood onto his shirt.
Vincent crossed the distance and knelt beside him.
"Who sent them?"
Patrick looked at Layla instead.
"Don't trust the woman in white."
His chest stopped moving.
Vincent checked his pulse.
"He's gone."
Layla backed away.
"You followed me."
"Dominic ordered me to make sure you reached home."
"He fired me."
"He didn't order me to stop protecting you."
Vincent's gaze dropped to the hand she had pressed over her abdomen.
Understanding entered his eyes.
"How far along?"
Layla did not answer.
He stood slowly.
"Are they Dominic's?"
"No."
Vincent looked at her as though he could hear the lie.
"You need to come upstairs."
"I need to disappear."
"The garage is locked down. Dominic can keep you safe."
"The woman he intends to marry just sent men to kill me."
Vincent's face became unreadable.
"You have proof?"
Layla thought of Seraphina's whisper.
Ms. Vale wants both problems buried tonight.
But the only living witness had been one of the men Vincent shot.
"I heard them say her name."
"That's not proof."
The words matched Dominic's exactly.
Layla stepped over Patrick's blood and walked toward the service exit.
"Then I have no reason to stay."
Vincent caught her arm.
"You will not make it past the street."
She turned on him.
"Then help me."
"If those children belong to Dominic—"
"They belong to me."
"That isn't how his world works."
"That's why I'm leaving it."
For several seconds, Vincent stared at her.
Then he released her and removed a key from his pocket.
"There's a maintenance van on Lower Level Three. The tank is full. Drive west until you reach Iowa. Don't use your phone. Don't contact anyone you know."
Layla took the key.
"Why are you helping me?"
Vincent glanced at Patrick's body.
"Because Dominic has enemies who use children as leverage, and friends who use them as insurance. I no longer know which is worse."
That was the last time Layla saw Gallow Tower for four months.
She drove through the night, traded the maintenance van for cash at a junkyard outside Davenport, and spent three weeks moving between cheap motels under borrowed names. Every morning, she expected to find Seraphina's men outside her door.
Every night, she dreamed of Dominic standing in the library with a gold mask in his hand.
Eventually, survival forced her to stop moving.
The weeks on the road taught her how quickly fear became routine. She learned which motels accepted cash without identification, which grocery stores had cameras facing the parking lot, and how to sleep in twenty-minute pieces with a chair wedged beneath the door handle.
She also learned the twins already had different tempers. One became active when she drank orange juice. The other moved whenever a truck engine rumbled outside. Layla spoke to them in whispers because her own voice was the only familiar thing she could promise.
She never used Dominic's name.
But on nights when the wind struck the motel windows, she remembered the library and wondered whether the man behind the mask had ever searched for the woman behind hers.
She settled in a river town in southern Wisconsin where no one cared who had owned her coat or why she flinched when black SUVs slowed outside the grocery store. She rented a room above a closed hardware shop and found work at a twenty-four-hour diner called Millie's.
By March, the babies were impossible to hide.
So was exhaustion.
At 2:47 on a freezing Thursday morning, Layla stood behind the counter beneath flickering fluorescent lights while sleet struck the windows. Her back ached. Her ankles were swollen. The diner smelled of coffee, onions, and industrial cleaner.
Only three customers remained.
A truck driver slept in a corner booth.
An elderly man completed a crossword puzzle.
A young couple argued in whispers near the jukebox.
Layla carried a fresh pot of coffee toward the counter when the front door opened.
Cold wind swept napkins from a table.
Dominic Gallow entered wearing a black overcoat darkened by rain.
Layla stopped breathing.
He looked thinner than she remembered. A pale scar cut through his left eyebrow, and his right hand was wrapped in a black leather glove. Two armed men remained outside beside a waiting sedan.
Dominic scanned the diner once.
Then his gaze found her.
The coffee pot slipped in Layla's hand.
She caught it before it fell.
For several seconds, neither of them moved.
Dominic crossed the room.
Each step carried four months of anger she could not read.
He stopped on the other side of the counter.
His eyes dropped to her abdomen.
The twins shifted beneath her stained apron.
Dominic's face became perfectly still.
"How far along are you?"
Layla set down the coffee pot.
"The kitchen is closing."
"How far?"
"You need to leave."
"Answer me."
"You don't give orders here."
The elderly man looked up from his crossword.
Dominic lowered his voice.
"Layla."
Hearing her name from him hurt more than she expected.
"You remembered."
His jaw tightened.
"I remember everyone who disappears after two men are killed in my garage."
"Patrick was murdered."
"And the men who attacked you were executed before they could speak."
"Vincent saved my life."
"Vincent vanished the same night."
Layla's fear sharpened.
"You haven't seen him?"
"Not since he stole my vehicle and wiped twelve minutes of security footage."
She gripped the counter.
"He told me to run."
"From me?"
"From Seraphina."
Dominic's eyes changed at the name.
"Be careful."
"Why? Because she is your fiancée now?"
"Because accusations without proof get people killed."
"I learned that in your office."
The young couple stopped arguing.
The truck driver woke and glanced toward them.
Dominic looked around the room.
"We are not doing this here."
"We aren't doing anything."
He leaned closer.
"Those children are mine."
Layla's heart slammed against her ribs.
"No."
"You were twelve weeks pregnant when you left Chicago."
"You don't know that."
"I know the clinic you visited."
She stared at him.
"You searched my medical records?"
"I searched everything after the attack."
"You had no right."
"Someone tried to kill you in my building."
"After you fired me and left me alone with the woman who arranged it."
"Seraphina was in my office when the shooting happened."
"That proves nothing."
"Neither does a sentence spoken by a masked gunman."
Layla pressed both hands against the counter to keep from trembling.
"You came all this way to defend her?"
"I came because a man in Milwaukee tried to sell me an ultrasound photograph with your name on it."
Her blood ran cold.
The photograph had been in her purse when she escaped.
She checked it every night.
"That's impossible."
Dominic reached into his coat and placed a folded image on the counter.
It was not the original ultrasound.
It showed Layla asleep in her rented room three nights earlier, one arm curved over her abdomen.
Someone had stood beside her bed.
On the bottom edge of the photograph, written in black ink, were three words.
Choose the grave.
Layla looked toward the dark windows.
"How did you find me?"
"The same way they did."
"Who are they?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then leave before they see you here."
"Too late."
Dominic's gaze shifted toward the parking lot.
A delivery truck had stopped across the road with its lights off.
The driver's window lowered.
Dominic vaulted over the counter.
He pulled Layla to the floor as automatic gunfire tore through the diner windows.
Glass rained over them.
The elderly man screamed.
The jukebox sparked and died.
Dominic covered Layla's body with his own while bullets shredded the shelves above the counter.
One of the babies kicked hard beneath his arm.
Dominic froze.
The gunfire stopped.
For one breathless moment, his palm remained against Layla's stomach.
Then the second baby moved.
Dominic looked at her.
All the cold authority left his face.
"Twins?"
Layla's eyes filled despite everything.
"Yes."
A metal canister rolled through the broken window.
Dominic recognized it first.
"Close your eyes."
White smoke exploded across the diner.
Layla heard tables overturn, men shouting, and the front door crash open.
Someone seized her ankles.
Dominic fired into the smoke.
A hand clamped over Layla's mouth.
She bit down and tasted blood.
Then a needle pierced her neck.
The last thing she heard before darkness took her was Dominic roaring her name, raw enough to cut through the smoke.
For a moment between consciousness and sleep, she felt herself being carried. A man's arm supported her back while another voice ordered someone to keep pressure on a wound. She tried to open her eyes, but the smoke had become a white ceiling and the ceiling became snow.
A familiar hand caught hers.
Then someone tore it away.
When Layla opened her eyes, she was strapped to a hospital bed in a room without windows.
A fetal monitor displayed two steady heartbeats.
Seraphina Vale sat beside her in a white dress.
May you like
She placed one hand over Layla's abdomen and smiled.
"Dominic thinks I rescued you," she said. "By sunrise, he will believe one of these babies died because of him."
