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“She is dead, Morozov.”

My gun shifted toward him, but he didn’t flinch.

“I know,” I croaked.

“Don’t let the Volkovs kill you, too.”

He crossed the apartment, bent, and closed one hand around the back of my coat. I struck his arm away hard enough that another man would certainly have taken it as a warning, but Raffaele merely tightened his jaw.

His men fired again in the hallway. The footsteps on the stairs faltered, then started climbing once more.

“You can die beside her,” Raffaele said, leaning close enough that I could see the fine lines beginning around his eyes. “It won’t make her any less dead.”

I wanted to kill him for saying it out loud. I wanted to kill every man in New York and then burn the city down.

Instead, I looked at my Mila’s face.

Raffaele reached for me again, slower this time. “I will not leave her to them. I promise you that, Morozov.”

His words were my undoing.

He pulled me upright. Blood loss made the room spin, but I fought it, my hand still locked around my gun as he drove his shoulder beneath my arm and moved me toward the kitchen. One of his men went onto the fire escape. The other backed through the apartment behind us, firing twice toward the hallway as a Volkov soldier reached the landing.

Cold air struck my face when we climbed out the window. The iron stairs trembled beneath our weight, slick with frost and old rain. By the time we reached the alley, a black Bellandi sedan waited with the rear door open and its engine running. Raffaele shoved me inside, climbed in after me, and struck the roof twice with his fist. The car shot forward before the door had fully closed.

I reached for the handle only to find it locked.

“Open it,” I demanded.

“No.”

“Open the fucking door.”

Raffaele took a white handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it against my ear. Blood soaked through the fabric within seconds.

“If you go back now, you’ll die.”

“I should have been there,” I said hoarsely.

“Yes. You should have.”

Most men would have lied. They would have said there was nothing I could’ve done. Instead of that, Raffaele held pressure against my ear and looked at me without pity. The city passed outside the darkened windows in streaks of dirty snow, neon, and blue police lights. I stared at the blood spreading across the cuff of his expensive shirt.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Because four Volkov cars crossed Bellandi streets tonight without permission.” His eyes hardened. “And because I know what they intended to do with your woman after they finished using her… to break you.”

My hand curled into a fist, but Raffaele didn’t look away. He didn’t say anything else, but his meaning was too clear.

Blood roared in my ears.

Raffaele took me to a private doctor operating beneath a funeral home in Bay Ridge. The doctor removed a torn piece of cartilage, stitched what remained of my ear, and informed me that the notch and the scar would be permanent. I tried to leave twice before Raffaele stationed one of his men at the door.

By sunrise, my name had been kept out of the police report. A detective loyal to Bellandi had taken control of the scene before anyone higher up understood what they were looking at. The building’s hallway camera conveniently failed. The blood attributed to a second man was dismissed as contamination from the dead Volkov on the bedroom floor. Witness statements changed, timestamps blurred, and the description of the armed Russian seen leaving through the alley vanished before the first official copy was filed.

The Volkovs had a contact inside the morgue who did their dirty work. They entered Mila without her name and marked her for transfer before anyone could notify what remained of her family, but Raffaele had better contacts. An assistant medical examiner delayed the release, a hospital administrator corrected the identification, and a Bellandi attorney arrived with paperwork no one wanted to challenge.

Two days later, Raffaele found a Russian Orthodox priest who asked no questions and arranged a burial in a small cemetery outside the city. My brothers didn’t attend. They wanted to, but bringing all five Morozovs into New York while the Volkovs were actively hunting us would have turned the funeral into another battlefield. For once, I listened to reason.