Chapter Two: The Life Dominic Stole
Five years earlier, Dominic Rossi had arrived at St. Aurelia Medical Center under a false name and too much blood.
Skylar was twenty-six then.
Too young to be as tired as she was.
Too good to be as disposable as the hospital believed.
She had been the youngest trauma fellow on the night shift, hair pinned up with a pen, hands steady from exhaustion. When the paramedics wheeled him in, no one gave her a chart.
Only a name.
Daniel.
Skylar cut open his shirt and found a bullet wound under his ribs.
“Name?”
“Daniel.”
“Lie better.”
His mouth twitched despite the blood.
“Dominic.”
“Good. Now stop dying.”
He did not stop.
Not quickly.
His pressure crashed twice. His hand caught her wrist during the second crash, grip brutal and pleading.
“Stay.”
“I am working.”
“Stay anyway.”
She stayed.
After that night, he returned in pieces.
A knife wound across his palm.
Cracked ribs.
A shoulder dislocation.
A fever he refused to explain.
He never came during the day.
He never brought the same men twice.
He never asked if she was afraid.
Maybe because she never was.
Dominic learned her routines. Coffee with too much sugar. Her father’s dialysis schedule. Her habit of touching the small gold cross at her throat before bad news.
Skylar learned his silences.
The one before pain.
The one before rage.
The one before tenderness.
That last one was the most dangerous.
He kissed her after a twelve-hour emergency, in a supply room that smelled of antiseptic and old gauze.
No promise.
No poetry.
Only his mouth against hers like a man stealing warmth from a world he did not deserve.
She let him.
That was the first mistake.
The second was believing he would not destroy what he touched.
The night everything ended, Dominic came to her apartment bleeding from a knife wound.
Not a street wound.
A message.
Skylar stitched him at her kitchen table while rain hit the window.
“You need to tell me.”
“No.”
“You came to my home.”
“I had nowhere else.”
That silenced her.
He looked at the door too often.
“Dominic.”
His hand covered hers.
“After tonight, forget me.”
“No.”
“You will live.”
Before she could answer, the door broke open.
Men in masks entered with guns and no fear.
Dominic fought half-dead.
Skylar grabbed a scalpel from her bag.
Someone slammed her into the wall.
She remembered glass.
A hand around her throat.
Dominic shouting her name.
Then nothing.
She woke two days later in a hospital bed with detectives beside her.
One masked man was dead.
Narcotics were found in her locker.
Patient files were altered under her access code.
Dominic Rossi had vanished.
Her medical license was suspended.
Her reputation bled out in public.
Her father’s insurance collapsed under “administrative review.”
No call came.
No explanation.
No apology.
For five years, Skylar rebuilt from ash.
Cash clinics.
Night work.
Quiet surgeries for people who could not afford clean rooms.
She became a doctor without a hospital.
Then Dr. Elaine Voss contacted her.
Carmela Rossi was declining too fast.
Elaine suspected medication manipulation, but Dominic’s estate security was impossible to bypass. Carmela, in one lucid afternoon, had signed a private care directive allowing Elaine to place a temporary caregiver inside the staff.
A maid was invisible.
A doctor was not.
Dominic was drowning in treaty negotiations with the Morettis. Temporary service staff for the gala passed through Matteo’s office, not Dominic’s.
That was the door.
Skylar used it.
She arrived as Penny with plain hair, soft shoes, and a forged history.
She planned to examine Carmela quietly.
Document the poisoning.
Leave before Dominic ever saw her.
But Dominic saw everything eventually.
Except the people standing closest to him.
That night in the ballroom, Matteo watched her from beside the medicine cabinet.
He touched his cufflink.
A gold crest glinted there.
Not Rossi.
Not quite.
Skylar looked away before he saw her looking.
She was too late.
Matteo already had.
