The scream wasn’t what made Dominic Vance drop his phone. In his world, people screamed all the time, in alleys, warehouses, boardrooms, and prayer-shaped silences that money could not soften.

Men screamed when they lost shipments, territory, blood, sons, leverage, or nerve. Bankers screamed without sound behind expensive smiles when numbers vanished. Politicians screamed inside their teeth and called it strategy.

Dominic had built his empire in rooms where terror was currency and composure was survival. He had heard every variation of human panic and trained himself to treat all of it

like weather: inconvenient, sometimes destructive, never personal. So no, the scream itself did not break him that night. What broke him was the name that followed.

It came from the far end of Saint Catherine’s private maternity wing, sharpened by labor and fear, and then carried back through polished corridors on the wheels of a gurney.

“Valentina!” a nurse shouted. “Move, now!” The name hit him first as sound, then as memory, then as impossible geometry rearranging the architecture of his chest from the inside.

Dominic Vance turned before he understood why. His mistress, Celeste Moreau, was doubled over in the wheelchair beside him, one hand gripping the armrest, the other digging nails

through the sleeve of his black coat as another contraction folded her in half. They had arrived through the underground entrance reserved for rich clients and dangerous men.

Dominic had assumed the night would follow a familiar pattern: money clearing obstacles, staff lowering their voices, security pretending not to see faces they recognized from newspapers, and Celeste