"No one," he says, with absolute, terrifying certainty, "will ever touch you again and live."
He walks down the hall, the heavy oak door opening and shutting with a solid, final thud.
I am alone in the massive room. The ticking of a grandfather clock somewhere in the distance is the only sound. I look at the plate of food. I look at the cup of dark espresso. I wrap my arms around my waist, clutching the black silk tight against my body, trying to hold myself together.
I am completely isolated. I am completely trapped.
And heaven help me, my lips are still burning from the ghost of his mouth.
4
Dominic
The heavy oakdoor clicks shut behind me, sealing Sienna inside my private suite. The lock engages with a solid, metallic thud, a sound that finally settles the violent, twisting knot in my gut. She is secured. She is inside my fortress, breathing my air, wearing my silk, surrounded by the men I have trained to kill without hesitation.
I turn away from the door and find my brother waiting in the dimly lit corridor.
Fabio stands six-foot-five, a lethal giant of a man whose loyalty to me was forged in the blood of our murdered parents twenty years ago. Right now, his massive arms are crossed over his chest, his jaw—inherited from our mother and currently locked tight—pulses rhythmically. He doesn't look like a man who just spent the night scrubbing Bellanti blood off a plastic-lined restaurant floor. He looks like a soldier who is sick of waiting for the real war to start, watching his oldest brother lose his fucking mind.
"You want to explain this to me, Dom?" Fabio's voice is a blunt, aggressive rasp that rips through the heavy silence of thehallway. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you just detonated two decades of tactical planning for a girl who brought a vase to a back-alley door."
"Peonies," I correct him, my voice completely flat, devoid of the chaos churning in my bloodstream. "She brought peonies. And she isn't a girl. She's twenty-eight years old, Fabio. And she is mine."
Fabio lets out a harsh, incredulous breath, stepping closer. "She's a civilian witness. A liability. We have no territory here yet. No soldiers. We barely have a foothold in the Gold Coast, and the Bellantis have been watching the Riverwalk for weeks. They've had eyes on L'Ombra since we opened—patient, systematic, long-lens surveillance. They've been picking apart what Lucia left them for a year, Dom. They finally cracked enough of the routing data to map our aliases. That's why they've been hitting the Riverwalk fronts—they know which businesses are ours. And your response to all of this is to lock a florist in your bedroom?"
"I claimed her."
"That is the exact same thing to the Chicago Police Department," Fabio snaps, his dark eyes flashing with blunt, restless energy. "Santi has been reviewing the street cameras. Her delivery van was parked in the alley for twenty minutes. If they had a man watching L'Ombra last night—and they did—they've already photographed those plates."
"Which is why the van is already in the compactor at the salvage yard," I interrupt, stepping into Fabio's space. I am forty-five years old. The silver at my temples was earned through a lifetime of calculated brutality, of turning myself into a weapon aimed squarely at the old-money syndicate that slaughtered our family.I am not a man who acts on impulse. I am the Don. Every move I have made since I was twenty-five has been orchestrated. I deliberately bankrupted our legitimate operations in Pine Valley. I funneled clean cash into a Ghost Fund. I even used my own sister, Lucia, marrying her off to a monster like Calix Ferraro just to secure an alliance.
Lucia's face—the memory of her terrified eyes—crushes my chest for a fraction of a second. I remember her frantic voice on the satellite phone, swearing she'd corrupted the operational files before the hardline cut. She tried to save us. She did save us—94% of the operational data was destroyed, reduced to financial routing fragments, breadcrumbs they've spent a year trying to reconstruct into a map. The Bellantis are patient, methodical vultures. They don't have our safe house locations. They don't have our alias identities or our compound security specs. What they have are fragments—routing headers and financial trails that a year of painstaking work has begun to translate. That year is up. The guilt is a living thing inside me, a parasite I feed every single day. I ruined the person I was supposed to protect because the mission required it.
But Sienna is not the mission. Sienna is the only thing in twenty years that has silenced the roaring violence in my head.
"The lease on her shop has been paid in full for five years through a blind trust," I tell Fabio, my voice dropping to a dangerous, absolute whisper. "Her suppliers are compensated. Her clients are refunded. Our cousin Enzo's crew is packing up her apartment as we speak. Vincenzo is scrubbing every trace of her life. But if they had a watcher in that alley last night, they may already have her plates, her name. It's a race." I hold Fabio's gaze, letting the full force of my authority settle into the silence between us. "Which is exactly why she stays inside thiscompound. She is not safer out there. She is a target the moment she steps outside these walls."
Fabio stares at me, parsing the sheer, suffocating scale of what I have orchestrated in the last eight hours. "You erased her life."
"I secured it." I hold his gaze without flinching. "Listen to me very carefully, Fabio. The Bellantis will not touch her. But more importantly, no one in this family will touch her. You will not question her presence. Santi will not track her without my authorization. Matteo will not interrogate her when he arrives. If a single man in this compound looks at her with anything less than absolute respect, I will blind him. If anyone raises a voice to her, I will cut out his tongue. Am I understood?"
Fabio's jaw flexes. He has carried every order I have ever given without question. Fabio was eighteen the night they killed our parents. Old enough to remember. Too young to be told the truth. He sees the absolute madness in my eyes right now, the obsessive, biological imperative that has hijacked my brain.
From the far end of the corridor, Santi pushes off the wall. He has been there the entire time—still as architecture, arms crossed, dark eyes tracking the conversation from the shadows. He waited until now to speak.
"They're not trying to destroy us yet," Santi says quietly. His voice carries the particular, unhurried calm of a man who has already thought four moves ahead. "Every strike this past month has been reconnaissance disguised as retaliation. They're mapping us. They want to know our full footprint before they commit to a killing blow." He lets that land. Then: "The van gives them a name. The name gives them a thread. Right now, Vincenzo is the only thing standing between that thread and the full picture."
The corridor goes silent.
"Understood, Don," Fabio says finally, his tone short and blunt.
"Good. Have Santi sweep the perimeter again. I want double shifts on the external cameras. No one sleeps until the Riverwalk mess is entirely scrubbed."
I don't wait for his dismissal. I turn my back on my brothers, key in the nine-digit biometric code on the keypad, and push the heavy oak door open.
The suite is entirely soundproofed,a fortress within a fortress. The air filtration system hums silently, but the sterile scent of my world has already been eradicated. The moment I cross the threshold, my lungs fill with the scent of her. Damp earth, crushed green stems, and the intoxicating, heavy sweetness of pink peonies.
I find her in the center of the massive living area, pacing like a caged fox.
