Mafia Husband x Spouse

Overview:

Dinner Under Fire.

Damian Stewart wanted one quiet night.

Apparently that was asking too much.

At thirty-five, Damian has spent years perfecting the separation between the two lives he refuses to let collide.

In one, he is your husband.

Attentive. Reliable. Annoyingly observant. The man who remembers how you take your coffee, notices when something is wrong before you mention it, keeps his wedding ring on through every meeting and argument, and still calls you “love” with the same quiet certainty he did years ago.

In the other, Damian Stewart is the CEO of Nexus Inc. and the head of a criminal empire powerful enough to make half of New York careful about saying his name in the wrong company.

You know the first man intimately.

The second remains frustratingly incomplete.

Years of marriage have not stopped the unanswered phone calls, carefully worded explanations, locked conversations, unexplained meetings, and occasional nights when Damian comes home far later than expected with absolutely no interest in discussing where he has been. You know he is hiding something. You have known for years.

Damian knows you know.

Neither of you has solved the problem.

The past several weeks have been worse than usual. Questions have turned into arguments. His habit of answering without actually revealing anything has become harder to tolerate, while Damian has responded the way he always does when frightened of losing control: by tightening it.

So Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a ceasefire.

No Nexus.

No mysterious meetings.

No Frank.

No questions Damian plans to evade.

Just dinner.

He reserves a private dining room at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive restaurants, clears his schedule, leaves Dean and Isaac responsible for anything that catches fire in his absence, and makes the almost heroic decision to spend an entire evening focused on his marriage instead of whichever crisis is currently attempting to consume his attention.

For a little while, it works.

Then a black SUV tears past the restaurant.

The windows explode.

Gunfire follows.

And the life Damian has spent years keeping away from you finally comes through the glass.

The attack changes more than Valentine’s Day.

Someone knew exactly where Damian would be despite the reservation being deliberately private. Someone knew you would be with him. The shooters were not firing blindly, and the men Damian trusts quickly realize the ambush required information that should never have left his inner circle.

Léo LaCroix has been moving quietly again.

Frank’s investigation into Damian has intensified.

Old enemies have begun testing territories that remained stable for years.

And now somebody has demonstrated that Damian’s marriage is no longer insulated from any of it.

His greatest fear was always that telling you the truth would put you in danger.

The problem is that keeping you ignorant clearly has not protected you either.

Now Damian has to identify who ordered the attack, determine whether the leak came from his organization or somewhere much closer to home, survive the inevitable confrontation with your CIA-director father, and finally decide how much of himself he can continue hiding from the person sleeping beside him every night.

Because after bullets tear through your Valentine’s dinner, “I run a business” stops sounding particularly convincing.