Chapter 5 - The Ashford Retaliation
By Wednesday morning, the underworld of New York was boiling over.
The collapse of the Hail-Ashford wedding wasn't just a social scandal; it was an economic earthquake. Victor Ashford—Coraline’s father and the undisputed king of the East Coast shipping cartels—did not take rejection lightly.
I sat at the mahogany desk in the Madison Avenue penthouse, reviewing encrypted security reports from Wesley, when the first attack hit.
“Boss, the Tribeca warehouse just took a mortar strike,” Wesley said, bursting into the study without knocking, his face smeared with soot. “No casualties, but the entire inventory of smuggled electronics is gone. The Ashfords aren't playing games anymore. They’re declaring open war.”
“Expected,” I muttered, not looking up from my tablet. “What about the docks in Brooklyn?”
“Secured. I doubled the patrols. But Victor has half the port authority on his payroll. If he shuts down our shipping lanes, our revenue drops forty percent within a week.”
“Let him try to choke the lanes,” I said coldly. “We have three alternate shipping networks running through Montreal that he doesn't know about. Reroute everything north.”
Just then, the heavy oak door to the study opened slowly.
Mave stood in the doorway, wearing a simple gray robe, her hair falling loosely around her shoulders. She looked better than she had days ago—the hollow circles under her eyes fading slightly thanks to real food and uninterrupted sleep—but anxiety still clung to her like a shadow.
“Are you safe here?” she asked quietly, her eyes darting to Wesley before landing on me. “I heard the guards talking downstairs. They said the Ashford family is trying to kill us.”
I stood up immediately, walking across the room to take her hands in mine. They were cool to the touch.
“Nobody is going to touch you, Mave. Not Victor, not Coraline, and certainly not my mother,” I said, my voice softening instinctively the moment I looked at her. “This is my mess. I’m cleaning it up.”
“It’s my mess too,” she replied, shaking her head. “If I hadn't come back into your life—”
“If you hadn't come back, I would have spent the rest of my life married to a stranger while my daughter grew up in the shadows,” I interrupted, placing a finger gently against her lips. “Stop blaming yourself for surviving. You did what you had to do to protect Posie. Now let me protect both of you.”
Mave looked up at me, a silent tear escaping her eye. She leaned into my touch, her hand rising to rest against my cheek. The warmth of her skin felt like coming home after a decade in exile.
“Where is Posie?” I asked, changing the subject to ease the heavy tension in the room.
“She’s in the nursery playing with the blocks Wesley bought her,” Mave smiled faintly. “She keeps asking when she can see her daddy again.”
My chest tightened with a fierce, protective ache. Daddy. A word I never thought I would hear, a title I never thought I deserved.
“Tell her daddy is going to finish cleaning up his house, and then we’re going to spend the entire afternoon building the biggest Lego tower Manhattan has ever seen,” I said.
Mave’s smile widened, reaching her eyes for the first time in three years. “She’d like that.”
Before I could pull her into my arms, the building’s security alarm blared—a shrill, ear-piercing shriek that made the glass windows vibrate.
May you like
Wesley’s radio hissed to life.
“Boss! We’ve got movement in the private elevator shaft! Multiple armed hostiles breaching the penthouse floor! It’s an elite strike team—Ashford’s men!”
