SHE TOOK A BULLET FOR HIS TWINS—CEO REALIZES HIS NANNY WAS ALWAYS HIS FAMILY
## CHAPTER 1
The bullet wasn’t meant for her. Selene Marsh knew that the moment she heard the crack, sharp and wrong, like the world splitting open, and saw the muzzle flash from the parking garage across the street. She didn’t think. She didn’t weigh the odds or calculate the risk. She just moved. Her body hit the ground before her mind caught up with what she’d done. She had thrown herself over the stroller, both of them, the double-wide navy blue one she’d pushed every morning for the past four months, and the twins screamed beneath her, two sets of small fists clutching her jacket. The pavement tore through her shoulder. She barely felt it at first. That came later. What she remembered most clearly in the weeks that followed was not the pain. It was the sound of footsteps, hard leather on concrete, and then a voice low and controlled saying to someone, “Find him now.” Then that same voice, directed at her, quieter. “Don’t move.” She hadn’t planned to.
Selene had taken the job in October, two weeks after her mother’s diagnosis and three days after her car had been repossessed from the hospital parking lot, a sequence of events that had felt, at the time, like the universe piling on with almost comical cruelty, the kind of week that seemed designed specifically to test how much a person could absorb before finally breaking under the accumulated weight of bad news. She remembered sitting in the unemployment office staring at a water stain on the ceiling shaped like a state she couldn’t identify when her phone buzzed. A placement agency she’d registered with months ago. *Private household staff. Competitive salary, immediate start.* She almost didn’t call back. She had a degree in early childhood development that she’d never finished using. She’d spent three years teaching kindergarten in Raleigh before her mother’s health started sliding, slowly at first, then all at once, and she’d had to come back to Chicago, abandoning a classroom she’d loved and a small apartment near a park where she used to walk on Sunday mornings, telling herself the move was temporary even as some quieter part of her understood it probably wasn’t, that some transitions in life simply don’t reverse themselves no matter how much you might wish otherwise. Now she was thirty-one, overqualified and underfunded, and her mother needed a medication that insurance wouldn’t cover, and the bills were already six weeks behind. She called back.
The agency sent her to a building on North Michigan Avenue, sixty stories of glass and steel, the kind that made you feel small from the sidewalk. A woman named Ms. Aldridge met her in the lobby with a clipboard and very little warmth, and explained efficiently, without eye contact, that she was interviewing for a live-in child care position with a Mr. Bastian Caruso. Two children, eighteen months old, boy and girl. The position included a private room on the residence floor, meals, and a salary that made Selene read the number twice. “He’s interviewed eleven candidates,” Ms. Aldridge said, clicking her pen. “None were retained past the second day.” “Why not?” Ms. Aldridge looked at her for the first time. “Because the children are difficult and Mr. Caruso is more so.” Selene said she would take the interview anyway.
She didn’t know anything about Bastian Caruso until she was riding the elevator to the forty-fourth floor and the man standing beside her — security, from the way he was built and the way he stood — said, without her asking, “First time here for an interview?” She said yes. He looked straight ahead. “Wear comfortable shoes.” She found out the rest on her phone while she waited outside a set of mahogany doors. Bastian Caruso, forty years old, CEO of Caruso Global, a private equity firm with fingers in construction, logistics, and three things she couldn’t fully parse from the search results. Born in Milan, educated in London, based in Chicago for the past seven years. No record of a wife, ex or otherwise. Two sources described him as intensely private. One described him as a man who has never once been photographed smiling.
The doors opened before she could put her phone away. He was already looking at her from across the room, and she had the distinct, unsettling feeling that he had been watching the hallway through some means she couldn’t see. He was taller than she’d expected from the photos, broader across the shoulders, and he wore his suit like it had been assembled around him — dark hair, dark eyes, a jaw that looked like it had been set in concrete sometime in his mid-thirties and never relaxed since, the entire effect of him somehow both intimidating and oddly precise, as though every element of his presentation had been considered and approved in advance. “Ms. Marsh,” he said, not a question. “Mr. Caruso.” He gestured to the chair across from his desk without any further ceremony and sat down himself. A manila folder sat between them. He didn’t open it. “My children have been through five caregivers in four months,” he said. “Each one quit. None were fired.”
