Chapter 8: The Cost of Peace

“You didn’t buy the bag,” Dominic noted smoothly. A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched the corner of his handsome mouth.

“It had her greasy, panicked handprints all over it,” Khloe said dryly, taking a long sip of the sparkling water. The carbonation burned pleasantly and sharply down her throat.

“Besides,” she added, setting the glass down in the cupholder. “Emerald green is a terrible color on me.”

Dominic let out a low, rough sound that might have actually been a laugh. He smoothly slid his thick arm around her shoulders, pulling her flush against his side.

He smelled strongly of the rain, crisp linen, and that faint, undeniable underlying metallic tang of danger.

“We’ll find something much better,” he murmured softly against her dark hair. “Something they didn’t touch.”

Khloe rested her heavy head against his broad chest, listening to the deeply comforting rhythm of his heart. The large car merged smoothly into the gray, sprawling arteries of the busy city.

She honestly didn’t want a new bag. She didn’t want the entire world to aggressively bow down to her.

She just wanted the quiet, complicated safety of this moving fortress. They were hurtling rapidly through a society that would never quite know what to do with either of them.

“Dominic?” she asked softly, watching the raindrops streak aggressively across the glass.

“Yes?”

“Did you really buy the lease to that building?” she asked, genuinely curious about the extent of his actual wrath.

“I bought the entire block,” Dominic replied without an ounce of hesitation. “The paperwork went through twenty minutes before we walked through those brass doors.”

Khloe let out a heavy sigh, closing her eyes again. “What are you going to do with a luxury mall, Dominic?”

“Whatever you tell me to do with it,” he answered casually, pulling her a fraction closer. “Turn it into a parking lot. Bulldoze it. Or leave it exactly as it is.”

Before Khloe could formulate a proper response to that massive revelation, Dominic’s encrypted phone buzzed aggressively in his interior jacket pocket. He pulled it out, his dark eyes scanning the brief text message.

The comfortable warmth in the car vanished in an absolute instant. Dominic’s posture went completely rigid, the muscles in his jaw ticking violently.

“Thomas,” Dominic barked toward the front partition, his voice entirely devoid of the warmth he had just shown Khloe. “Change the route. Get us to the South Port warehouses immediately.”

“What’s wrong?” Khloe asked, sitting up straight, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs.

Dominic didn’t look at her. He racked the slide of a sleek black handgun he had pulled from his ankle holster.

“Someone didn’t get the message about touching what is mine,” Dominic growled, his eyes completely dead once again. “Stay in the car when we get there.”

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