The Syndicate's Ghost: Don's Forgotten Queen

Harper's POV:

All night, I watched the glowing dot on my watch screen. It pulsed, steady and unwavering, over Kasey Sharpe's address. Eli's heartbeat, a rhythmic thrum against my wrist, was a constant, intimate torment. He was with her. His heart was calm. Steady. He was at peace.

My own heart was a frantic bird trapped against my ribs.

A loud crash from upstairs shattered the silence and sent a jolt through my body. It came from the room that had been prepared for Cody.

I found the boy standing in a wasteland of his own making. Broken toys littered the floor like casualties of war. Drawers gaped open, their contents disgorged across the carpet. A lamp lay shattered, its cord snaking toward the wall. He was systematically, methodically, tearing the room apart.

"Cody, stop," I said, my voice a low tremor, tight with the rage I fought to contain.

He turned to me, his eyes wild. With a shriek, he launched himself at me, his small fists pummeling my legs. I grabbed his arms.

It was a mistake.

He immediately went limp, collapsing to the floor in a heap. A piercing scream tore from his throat, a sound of pure, fabricated terror.

"You hurt me!" he wailed, clutching his arm as if it were broken. "You hurt me! I'm going to tell my father! I'm going to tell the Don!"

I backed away, my hands trembling.

I retreated downstairs and sank into a chair in the cavernous living room, tortured by two sounds: the manufactured sobs of the boy upstairs and the steady, betraying beat of my husband's heart from across the city.

The heavy front door slammed open. It wasn't Eli. It was his mother, Florence Stark. The Matriarch. A woman who looked as if she'd been carved from glacial ice, her defining feature the open contempt she held for me, the civilian who had "weakened" the Stark bloodline.

Her eyes, chips of frost, found me. She didn't bother with the stairs; she came straight for me, her face a thunderous mask. "Where is he?" she demanded. "What have you done to the boy?"

She dragged me by the arm, her fingers digging into my flesh, and hauled me up the grand staircase and down the hall to Cody's room. Kasey was already there-of course she was-kneeling by the bed. She must have been the one to call.

"Florence, thank God you're here," Kasey breathed, her voice a pitch-perfect imitation of panic as she dabbed a cool cloth on the boy's forehead. He was flushed, his breathing shallow. "He has a fever."

Cody's eyes fluttered open. He saw me in the doorway, trapped in the Matriarch's grip. A small, trembling finger rose and pointed directly at me.

"She hit me," he whispered.

Kasey let out a sharp, theatrical gasp. "He was so scared. He said she was so angry."

Florence's gaze sharpened. With a chilling calm, she lifted the hem of his pajama pants, revealing a dark, ugly bruise blooming on his shin. A bruise I had never seen before. A sickening certainty coiled in my gut. Kasey had put it there.

The slap was so hard my head snapped to the side, my cheek erupting in white-hot pain.

"You barren whore," Florence hissed, her voice a low, venomous whisper. "You dare lay a hand on his son? On the future of this family?"

And then, as if summoned by the violence, Eli was there. He stood in the doorway, taking in the tableau: his hysterical mother, his distraught mistress, his sick son, and me-his wife-with the flowering red imprint of his mother's hand on my face.

His expression was one of glacial disappointment. He didn't ask a single question. He didn't search for the truth. He looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw my verdict.

"Take her," he said to the two guards who had followed him in.

They grabbed my arms. I didn't fight. What was the point?

They dragged me from the penthouse, down a service elevator, and across the dark estate grounds to a small, stone building near the edge of the property. The pump house for the old water reservoir.

They threw me inside, and the heavy iron door boomed shut, the lock grinding into place. It was dark, and the cold was immediate. The air hung thick with the smell of damp earth and rust.

And then I heard it. The slow, steady trickle of water.

Icy water seeped from a pipe near the floor, pooling around my ankles. It rose slowly, relentlessly. To my knees. To my waist.

The memory of Leo, of pulling his small, lifeless body from the lake, consumed me. The cold, the dark, the water. My deepest fears, weaponized against me by the man I once loved.

I didn't scream. I simply folded into the icy blackness and let it take me.