Chapter 4 - The Five Points in the Apron PocketLaurel blinked, a sudden spike of panic tightening her chest.
“Sir?”
“You heard him!” Genevieve sneered, jumping on the command with desperate malice. “She probably has stolen silverware in her apron! These agency temps steal salt shakers and antique spoons every time they work a private residence!”
Laurel’s cheeks burned with indignant heat. She reached into her left apron pocket, pulling out two folded linen service napkins, a stainless steel corkscrew, and a small roll of clean white masking tape. She laid them neatly on the marble console table.
“Now the other pocket,” Damian said quietly.
Laurel hesitated. Her fingers tightened around the fabric of her right pocket.
Inside was the soft, damp piece of wax paper.
Theo’s clay star.
It was childish. It was absurd. In a ballroom dripping with thirty million dollars in diamonds and antique tapestries, pulling out a lump of wet brown mud looked like madness.
“Empty it, Laurel,” Damian repeated, his gray eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that seemed to drill straight through her ribs.
Slowly, her chin raised high, refusing to show shame for her brother’s gift, Laurel reached into the bottom of her pocket.
She drew out the folded wax paper.
With careful, deliberate fingers, she peeled back the greasy paper, revealing the small, five-pointed star molded from dark river clay.
The edges were slightly crooked. The center was pressed flat, bearing the rough ridges of her thumb and the tiny, searching indentations of Theo’s six-year-old fingertips.
Genevieve let out a loud, mocking bray of laughter that shattered the quiet.
“What on earth is that disgusting piece of filth? She’s carrying wet dirt in her apron! Did she dig that out of the gutter on her way through the service gate?”
Damian Blackwood did not laugh.
He did not blink.
He stopped breathing entirely.
Every muscle in his six-foot-three frame locked into solid granite.
His gray eyes dilated until they were pitch-black, staring at the crooked clay star resting in Laurel’s palm as if he were looking at an open grave.
The color drained from his face so fast that the jagged white scar across his jaw stood out like a streak of lightning against stone.
Slowly, with a hand that had never trembled in a firefight, a hand that had signed executions without hesitation, Damian Blackwood reached out.
His calloused fingers brushed against the cool, damp clay.
He touched the center point where the thumbprint sat.
Then he touched the five uneven points pinched around the rim.
A suffocating, primeval silence fell over the terrace salon.
“Where did you get this?” Damian whispered.
His voice was barely audible, yet it held a tremor so raw, so violently undone, that Marcus took half a step forward, his hand instinctively resting on his sidearm.
Laurel looked up, confused by the sudden, terrifying reverence in the mobster's eyes.
“My... my little brother made it this morning, sir. He’s six years old.”
Damian’s chest heaved. “Who taught him how to pinch the five points like this?”
“I did,” Laurel answered softly, her voice carrying through the frozen hall. “My mother taught me when I was a little girl in the orphanage in Albany.”
The entire ballroom disappeared around them.
Damian looked into her hazel eyes—really looked into them—past the exhaustion, past the cheap black service dress, down into the calm, unbreakable core that had survived twenty years of cold rooms.
He saw the girl in the oversized gray nightgown.
He smelled the damp melted snow on the rag pressed against his fevered forehead.
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He heard the quiet, steady voice whispering in the dark of the attic: As long as you hold the star, Damian, the darkness won't catch you.
“It was you,” Damian whispered.
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