“Would you have dinner with me?” Dominic asked, his voice stripped of its usual terrifying authority. Scarlett looked at the man who owned half the city, crossed her arms over her stained diner apron, and flatly replied, “No.”
Chapter 5: The Seventeen-Minute Confession
The third time Dominic Caruso entered the Cornerstone Diner, he threw away the script.
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon at 2:00 PM. No black Escalades idled at the curb. No armed bodyguards scanned the perimeter. Dominic walked through the glass doors wearing faded denim jeans and a thick gray wool sweater.
He looked so disarmingly normal that Scarlett almost failed to recognize him until she stood right at his table, holding her green notepad.
She stopped dead in her tracks. He looked up.
“I have a question for you,” Dominic said, his dark eyes locking onto hers. “And I want you to answer me as if I am not whoever you now know I am. Answer me as if I’m just the difficult, arrogant customer from a few weeks ago who owes you a proper apology.”
Scarlett studied his face. Her guard rose. “What is the question?”
“Would you have dinner with me?” Dominic asked softly.
She stared at him. The diner hummed around them, oblivious to the massive shift in gravity at table six.
“That’s not a question,” Scarlett said. “You didn’t use a question mark. You said it like an order.”
A rare, genuine warmth touched his handsome face.
“Would you have dinner with me?” Dominic asked again. The questioning inflection hung undeniable in the air.
“No,” Scarlett said.
He nodded slowly, as if she offered the exact answer he expected, and perhaps the one he respected the most.
“Is it because of who I am?” Dominic asked.
“No,” Scarlett replied, gripping her notepad. “It is because I don’t know who you are. The things I’ve learned about you and your family since that first night scare me. And I have a strict policy: I do not date men who scare me.”
“That seems like a reasonable policy,” Dominic admitted, leaning back against the vinyl booth. “It’s the exact same policy that kept me alive this long.”
He looked at her, the tension stretching tight between them.
“What if I could explain it to you?” Dominic offered quietly. “The things you found out. What if I could explain?”
“You cannot explain your way into making me comfortable with organized crime, Mr. Caruso,” Scarlett countered.
“Maybe not,” Dominic conceded. “But I prefer that you say no knowing the actual truth, rather than saying no while assuming the worst.”
Scarlett dropped her green notepad onto the table with a soft thud.
She pulled out the opposite vinyl chair and sat down directly across from him. She glanced up at the ticking clock on the diner wall.
“You have until I need to refill table nine’s coffee,” Scarlett stated. “Go.”
What followed lasted exactly seventeen minutes. She knew this precisely, because she kept one eye on the wall clock the entire time.
In those seventeen minutes, Dominic Caruso told her more truth than he told another human being in years. Not all of it. In his world, some dark rooms lacked doors.
But he told her enough.
He told her the import business was real, and the terrifying reputation was earned. He confessed that he committed unforgivable acts he would never try to defend. He told her he hadn’t fully become his ruthless father, but he hadn’t escaped his shadow, either.
“I tried twice to restructure the entire operation into something legitimate,” Dominic explained, his voice thick with frustration. “Legally legitimate. Both times, men who refused to lose their illicit income made it impossible.”
He leaned closer over the table.
“Jeffrey Hart is not just my corporate lawyer,” Dominic confessed. “He is the only person on earth who tells me the brutal truth about myself. I pay him extremely well for that rare privilege.”
“What about the job offer?” Scarlett challenged, her eyes narrowing. “The thirty-four dollars an hour. Was that hush money?”
“No,” Dominic said, shaking his head. “It was guilt.”
Scarlett blinked. “Guilt?”
“I treated you like garbage for no reason,” Dominic admitted, staring at his hands. “You clearly work too hard for far too little money. My first instinct was to fix my failure by throwing cash at it. I do that with everything in my life, and it almost never works.”
Table nine’s coffee carafe ran low.
“Why me?” Scarlett asked softly. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you told me you would end me,” Dominic said. A faint smile touched his lips.
Scarlett’s face flushed. “I was angry.”
“In my adult life, men with vast resources, hitmen, and massive legal teams have threatened me,” Dominic said seriously. “Not a single one of them scared me the way you did that night.”
“Because I wasn’t scared of you,” Scarlett realized out loud.
“Yes,” Dominic nodded. “I was fascinated by it. I still am.”
Scarlett looked at him, absorbing the sheer honesty of his confession. Then she stood up, picked up her green notepad, and smoothed her apron.
“I’ll think about it,” Scarlett said.
She turned and walked away to refill table nine’s coffee.
If a known criminal offered you complete honesty, would you give them a chance, or would you run the other direction to protect your own peace?
