Chapter 2: The Vice Grip of the Dawn
“I… I’m sorry, Mrs. Dawson,” Mia whispered, her voice a raspy, broken shadow of its former self. “I’ll clean it. I’m sorry. Please don’t call Bradley.”
“Sorry doesn’t pay for the vase, you little leech!” Evelyn hissed, raising the leather riding crop high into the air. “Maybe a lesson across your back will remind you of your actual place in this house.”
The crop began its swift descent. It never made contact.
Nicholas moved with a terrifying, predatory speed that defied his fifty-five years of age. Before Evelyn could even register a shift in the air, a massive, scarred hand clamped around her wrist in a vice grip forged in the yards of a federal penitentiary.
The expected snap of the leather crop was abruptly replaced by the sickening, muffled sound of bone grinding against bone.
Evelyn shrieked in agony, dropping the crop instantly as she twisted around to face her attacker. “Who the hell do you—”
The words died violently in her throat. The color completely drained from her heavily made-up face, leaving her looking like a painted corpse.
“N-Nicholas,” she choked out, her knees buckling under the pressure of his grip.
“If you ever,” Nicholas whispered, his voice dangerously low, vibrating with a lethal, suppressed rage that made the sunroom windows seem to rattle, “breathe in her direction again, I will cut you into pieces and feed you to the dogs.”
He shoved Evelyn backward with such immense force that she crashed into a nearby mahogany console table, sending a silver tea tray clattering loudly to the floor.
Nicholas dropped heavily to his knees, completely ignoring the dirty water and broken glass, utterly ruining his custom three-thousand-dollar suit.
“Mia,” he choked out, his rough hands trembling as he reached for her bleeding palm. “Mia, my God. Bambina.”
Mia flinched violently at the movement. She scrambled backward like a terrified, abused animal, her spine hitting the wall behind her. Her wide, traumatized eyes darted wildly around the room. When she finally locked her eyes onto his face, there was no relief. There was no joy. There was only profound, paralyzing horror.
“No!” she whimpered, pulling her knees tightly to her chest to cover her uniform. “No, please don’t let him sell me again! Please, I’ll work harder! I’ll do whatever Bradley wants!”
Nicholas felt a sharp, physical pain tear through his chest, a wound deeper than any bullet he had ever taken in the street wars.
“Sell you, Mia? What are you saying? It’s me. It’s Dad. I’m home. I’m taking you out of this house right now.”
“You lied to me!” she suddenly screamed, her voice cracking with years of built-up, repressed agony. She was shaking so hard her teeth clattered. “Rick told me! He showed me the bank transfers, Dad! He showed me the documents! You traded my entire trust fund to him to pay off your debts to the Colombians! You gave me to him to be… to be Bradley’s property!”
Nicholas’s blood turned to pure ice in his veins.
Bradley. Rick’s sociopathic, drug-addicted twenty-five-year-old son.
The catastrophic implications of what she was saying crashed over Nicholas like a tidal wave. Rick Dawson hadn’t just stolen the fifty million dollars. He had orchestrated a complete, calculated psychological destruction of Nicholas’s daughter, poisoning her mind to believe her own father had sold her into horrific servitude just to save his own skin.
Heavy, hurried footsteps suddenly echoed down the grand staircase outside.
“Evelyn, what the hell is all that racket down there?” Rick Dawson barked, rounding the corner into the sunroom, flanked by four heavily armed private security guards.
Rick stopped dead in his tracks. He was dressed in a velvet smoking jacket, a vintage Cuban cigar practically falling from his slack jaw. For a span of ten agonizing seconds, absolute silence gripped the room.
Then, Rick forced a hollow, arrogant chuckle, though the instant sweat beading on his forehead betrayed his terror. He cleared his throat nervously.
“Nicholas. You’re… you’re out early. Your federal sentence wasn’t up until 2028.”
Nicholas slowly rose to his feet. He didn’t look at the four armed guards. He kept his eyes locked entirely on the man he had once called a brother.
“You took my empire, Rick. That’s business,” Nicholas said softly, his tone dropping into a terrifyingly calm register. “But you put my daughter in a maid’s uniform. You let your wife beat her. And for that, there is no corner of this earth where you can hide from me.”
