Chapter 1 - The Seventh Gown in the Shadows and the Blood on the Tailor's Shears
The seventh dress was still hanging untouched in the fitting room when my husband overheard me apologizing for the way I looked beside him.
Adrien Moretti had faced armed enemies, boardroom betrayals, and men who actively plotted his demise across three continents. Yet nothing in his calculated, dangerous world had prepared him for the quiet destruction of hearing his own wife whisper through tears:
“Maybe everyone would be better off if I stopped trying to look like I belong next to him.”
Rain lashed against the floor-to-ceiling glass of Chicago’s Ashford Hotel. Outside, Michigan Avenue was a blur of yellow cabs and wet asphalt, but inside Suite 804, the atmosphere was suffocating. I stood before a three-paneled gilded mirror clad only in a black silk slip. The suite had been converted into an exclusive dressing room for the Moretti Foundation’s annual winter gala. Brass garment racks bowed under heavy fabric, designer stilettos lined the Persian rug, and the quiet scent of lilies mixed sickly with expensive perfume.
A seamstress had fled thirty minutes earlier after Vanessa Whitmore entered and smoothly announced that the Mrs. Moretti required “a little privacy.”
I should have locked the double doors behind the seamstress. Vanessa never sought privacy unless she meant to slide a blade between your ribs with a polite smile.
I looked at my reflection under the warm chandeliers. I was healthy, with soft brown hair framing collarbones that weren’t hollowed out, feminine curves, and a face that ordinary people called pretty before I married a man whose jawline was analyzed in quarterly financial magazines. I had never despised my reflection. Not when I spent twelve-hour days covered in lint and dye at my textile studio. Not until the public decided my existence was an insult to Adrien’s aesthetic legacy.
Vanessa stepped behind me, her pearl-gray column dress whispering across the floor.
“Emily, you know I consider you family,” Vanessa said, adjusting the strap of my slip with icy fingertips. “I’m only saying this because the press is relentless. I want to protect you.”
“From what, Vanessa?”
“From becoming the punchline of your husband’s empire.”
My stomach dropped into a sickening void. Beside the mirror hung the seventh gown: a custom midnight-blue silk crepe dress. Clean, severe, stunning. Adrien had spent three weeks tracking down the rare vintage silk, though I hadn’t known that yet.
“You’ve read the forums,” Vanessa said, watching my eyes in the glass. “They’re calling these deliveries your pity wardrobe.”
The words struck like physical blows.
“The emerald silk,” Vanessa recited smoothly, ticking fingers off one by one. “The burgundy velvet. The champagne satin. The black crepe. The sapphire chiffon. Six dresses, Emily. Adrien sends them via courier because he is terrified of what you’ll pick out yourself. He’s desperate to mold you into someone who makes sense beside him.”
“Stop,” I whispered.
“Heiresses, models, international diplomats—those are the women who know how to stand under flashbulbs without looking like they won a raffle. Look at yourself. That blue dress will wear you alive.”
“I said stop.” My voice trembled, hot anger finally cutting through the paralyzing shame. I turned toward the midnight-blue gown, my fingers brushing the heavy hem. “The worst part is… I loved every single one of them.”
Vanessa paused, a predatory curiosity lighting her eyes. “Then why did you return every single box?”
A bitter, broken laugh escaped my throat. “Because every time I put one on, I imagined the flashbulbs. I could already hear the sneers asking why Adrien Moretti settled for a charity case. I returned them because I wanted to save him the humiliation.”
What neither of us knew was that Adrien was standing on the other side of the half-open mahogany door. He had caught every word.
He had received six returned deliveries at his office over the last two months. Six times, Marcus Hale, his head of security and personal aide, had carried those boxes back into the suite. Six times, Adrien had sat in silence, believing his wife hated his taste, believing he was failing to give me what I wanted.
“If I stop trying to stand beside him,” I whispered to the empty room, “maybe they’ll stop using me to tear him down.”
Vanessa smiled—a thin, satisfied curl of crimson lipstick. “Then keep doing the smart thing, darling. Stay in the suite tonight.”
The heavy mahogany door swung open with a violent shudder.
Vanessa went chalk-white.
Adrien stood in the doorway. He had shed his tuxedo jacket somewhere down the hall; his crisp black dress shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, sleeves rolled up over scarred, muscular forearms. Raindrops still glistened in his dark hair.
He didn't yell. Adrien was at his most lethal when his voice dropped to a low, velvet hum.
“Get out,” Adrien said.
Vanessa swallowed, trying to summon her practiced socialite composure. “Adrien, please. She was having an episode. I was merely helping her navigate—”
“Vanessa.” He didn’t raise his volume, but the air turned to ice. “If you ever speak to my wife again before I decide how to handle your family, you will find yourself completely erased from this city. Leave.”
Vanessa snatched her clutch from the vanity and slipped past him without another breath.
The silence that followed was louder than gunfire.
I couldn’t look at him. I stood barefoot on the carpet, hugging my arms over my chest in the silk slip. Adrien did not immediately close the distance between us. He looked at the six empty velvet hangers, and then at the midnight-blue gown.
“You returned them because you liked them?” he asked, his voice strained.
I nodded miserably.
“All six?”
“Yes.”
His jaw clenched hard enough to crack bone. “Did I do this to you? Did I ever say a single word that made you feel inadequate?”
“No, Adrien.”
“Did I ask you to lose weight? Change your hair? Learn how to perform for cameras?”
“No!”
“Then why the hell are strangers allowed a vote in my marriage?” He crossed the room in two long strides, stopping inches from me. The heat radiating from his chest was overwhelming. “I bought the emerald dress because you stared at a scrap of fabric that exact shade on Oak Street for eleven seconds. I bought the burgundy velvet because you told me your mother wore it on your eighth Christmas. And I had this blue one crafted because the night I bled on your cutting table, you had blue silk thread wrapped around your thumb.”
Tears spilled over my lashes. “You remember that?”
“I remember every second of the night I found you,” Adrien whispered fiercely.
Three months earlier, my life had been quiet, orderly, and entirely separate from the Moretti name. I was a textile restorer working out of a historic brick studio in the West Loop—the same workshop my father, Daniel Carter, had operated before his death fourteen years ago.
At 11:17 PM on a freezing November night, three heavy pounding blows had rattled my reinforced oak doors. I had grabbed my ten-inch heavy iron dressmaker shears before opening the door four inches.
Adrien Moretti had stood there in the pouring rain, holding a blood-soaked charcoal coat around his ribs. Marcus Hale had flanked him, hand inside his jacket.
“Emily Carter?” Adrien had demanded.
“Depends on whether you’re here to pay a bill or give me a migraine,” I had replied.
He had pushed inside, tossing a torn tuxedo jacket onto my cutting table. “Sew it. You have thirty minutes.”
“Forty,” I had countered. “Or bleed out in the alley.”
When I slipped my seam ripper into the silk lining under the high-intensity halogen lamp, my blade had struck something dense and metallic. A flattened piece of lead had dropped onto the maple wood with a dull clink.
Marcus had drawn his weapon in a split second. “Don’t touch that.”
I had ignored him, lifting the deformed brass-jacketed slug with fine-point tweezers. “This didn’t come from a jagged car bumper, Mr. Moretti. This is custom ordnance.”
Adrien had leaned over the table, his dark eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that terrified me. “Turn it over.”
I had flipped the metal. Stamped onto the base was a distinct mark: an inverted crescent moon enclosing a five-pointed star.
Adrien’s breath had caught. Marcus had cursed violently under his breath.
“Where did you learn high-end structural restoration?” Adrien had asked in a low, dangerous tone.
“My father. Daniel Carter.”
At the mention of my father's name, both men had frozen as if a ghost had materialized in the workshop.
“Your father was a tailor?” Adrien’s voice had lost its cold edge, replaced by an emotion I couldn't identify.
“He was an artisan. He died when I was fourteen. A mugging gone wrong in River North.”
Adrien and Marcus had exchanged a dark, impenetrable look. Adrien had taken the bullet fragment, wrapped it in a linen handkerchief, and locked his gaze with mine. “Fix the jacket, Miss Carter. And forget the mark.”
I hadn't forgotten. And forty-eight hours later, when a courier delivered a box of antique nineteenth-century jet beads I’d been hunting for years, our whirlwind romance had ignited. We married eight weeks later.
Now, standing in Suite 804 in my slip, with the midnight-blue gown between us, the shadow of that night surged back into the room.
May you like
Adrien reached out and gently gripped my chin, lifting my face toward his. “Put the dress on, Emily. Not for the press. Not for the foundation. For me.”
I looked into his eyes—dark, fierce, and entirely stripped of his usual corporate armor. With trembling hands, I took the midnight-blue gown from the hanger and stepped behind the dressing screen.
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