"**“TAKE HER PLATE AWAY! SHE'S NOT WELCOME HERE!” THE MAFIA BOSS'S FIANCÉE HUMILIATED A CRYING WOMAN IN FRONT OF 30 WEALTHY GUESTS—BUT WHEN THE YOUNG MAID REFUSED, LUCA MORETTI DISCOVERED WHY HIS BEST FRIEND COULDN'T LOOK HIS OWN WIFE IN THE EYES. WHAT CAME OUT NEXT THREATENED HIS ENTIRE WEDDING.**

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“Luca!”

My scream tore through the chaos of the ballroom, raw, terrified, and drenched in panic.

The world devolved into instantaneous, deafening bedlam. Before Vanessa could pull the second hammer of her chrome derringer, Gianni leaped across the dais like an enraged panther, his heavy boot kicking the weapon from her fingers with a sickening crack of bone. Vanessa shrieked as she was slammed face-first onto the marble floor, pinned under Gianni’s tactical knee, while Mario Falco and six other capos surrounded Donato, disarming him and forcing him to his knees with gun barrels pressed against his ears.

None of that mattered. None of it existed to me.

The only thing in the universe was the crushing weight of the man collapsing into my arms.

Luca fell heavily to one knee, his forehead resting against my shoulder, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps that smelled of iron. I fell with him, our knees hitting the shattered glass and spilled champagne on the floor. My trembling hands frantically clawed at the back of his suit jacket, searching for the wound, and when I pulled my fingers away, they were slick, dripping with thick, dark arterial blood.

The bullet had struck him high in the right shoulder, dangerously close to his spine.

“Luca... Luca, stay with me! Look at me!” I sobbed, tears blurring my vision as I ripped the silk apron from my waist, pressing the crumpled white cloth violently against the gaping wound to stem the tide.

Luca lifted his head with agonizing effort. His skin had gone a terrifying shade of translucent gray, a bead of cold sweat running down the sharp angle of his jaw. Yet, even as his strength drained onto the cold marble, his dark eyes remained fixed on my face with an intensity that burned through the agony racking his frame.

He raised a trembling, blood-stained hand, his fingers curling gently around the side of my neck, holding me close as if I were the only anchor keeping him from slipping into the dark.

“Are you... hit?” he rasped, his voice barely a rough whisper.

Fresh sobs tore from my throat. “No! No, you idiot, you took the bullet for me! Why did you do that? Why would you throw yourself in front of a gun for a maid?”

A faint, broken smile touched Luca’s pale lips. A drop of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, but his gaze never wavered.

“Because you are... not a maid to me, Emily,” Luca breathed, his thumb brushing a tear from my trembling lip. “You never were. You are the only clean thing... in my entire ruined life.”

His eyes fluttered shut, his heavy head slumping forward against my chest as his hand slipped weakly from my neck.

“Luca! No! Don’t you dare close your eyes!” I screamed, pressing the blood-soaked linen harder against his back, feeling the terrifyingly rapid flutter of his pulse beneath my palms. “Gianni! Help him! Call an ambulance! He’s dying!”

Gianni sprinted down from the dais, leaving the sobbing Vanessa pinned under the boots of two loyal soldiers. He slid across the blood-slick floor, ripping off his tactical belt and applying a combat tourniquet with brutal, efficient speed.

“No public ambulances!” Gianni barked, his face pale with dread. “The city hospitals are monitored by the feds and the Marcones! If Luca is admitted under his own name, they’ll suffocate him in the recovery room! We take him to St. Anthony’s private underground clinic on 18th Street!”

Gianni scooped Luca’s limp, towering frame into his massive arms as if he weighed nothing, shouting orders to the bewildered, furious capos.

“Falco! Secure the traitors! If Donato or the girl takes a single breath outside this room, you answer to me when the Boss wakes up!”

“Go!” Falco roared back, his revolver still pressed to Donato’s forehead. “Get our don to the clinic! The council will hold the line until he returns!”

I scrambled to my feet, my shoes slipping in the blood, my hands and uniform stained in crimson, and ran behind Gianni as he kicked open the emergency exits toward the waiting Maybach.

The drive through the midnight streets of Chicago was a nightmare of screaming tires, flashing red lights, and the metallic smell of death.

I sat in the back seat, holding Luca’s head in my lap, my hands pressed with all my weight against the crimson pressure dressing on his shoulder. With every turn of the vehicle, his body jostled against mine, his skin growing colder, his breathing turning into a faint, whistling wheeze.

“Please, Luca,” I wept quietly in the dark of the car, stroking his dark, damp hair back from his forehead, leaning down until my lips brushed his cold ear. “Please don’t leave me. You promised me my mother would be safe. You promised you would take me to Michigan. You have to keep your word. A Moretti always keeps his word, right? Please... fight it.”

As if hearing my voice across the vast expanse of unconsciousness, Luca’s brow twitched. His cold fingers weakly reached out across the leather seat, blindly searching for mine. I grabbed his hand, squeezing it with everything I had, intertwining our fingers as his blood dried between our palms.

“I’m here, Luca,” I whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The car screeched to a halt behind a dilapidated industrial laundromat on 18th Street.

Two men in sterile blue scrubs and heavy tactical vests burst through the steel double doors, wheeling a metal gurney into the pouring rain. Within seconds, Luca was lifted onto the cart and rushed down a concrete ramp into a subterranean trauma center equipped with state-of-the-art surgical lighting and cardiac monitors—a ghost hospital built specifically to treat the wounded of Chicago’s underworld off the books.

“Gunshot wound, right subclavicular, massive hemorrhaging, BP dropping rapidly!” a gray-haired surgeon shouted, cutting away the remnants of Luca’s bespoke shirt with trauma shears. “Get two units of O-negative on the rapid infuser! Prep the thoracic tray!”

I tried to follow the gurney through the swinging double doors of the operating theater, but a nurse in a lead apron caught me by the shoulders, pushing me back into the sterile hallway.

“You can’t come in here, miss! You need to wait in the corridor!”

“Please! Let me stay with him!” I begged, my voice cracking into hysterical sobs. “He’s losing too much blood!”

“We’re doing everything we can! Wait outside!”

The heavy double doors swung shut, the frosted glass cutting off my view of the monitors, leaving only the harsh, rhythmic drone of alarm sirens and the urgent shouting of the surgical team.

I collapsed against the pale linoleum wall of the empty hallway, sliding down until I was sitting on the cold floor, pulling my knees to my chest.

I looked down at my hands. They were coated in Luca Moretti’s blood. The white lace apron I had ironed so carefully this afternoon was soaked in crimson, torn and filthy. The silver sapphire pendant rested against my breastbone, heavy, cold, and burning like an open wound.

Less than twelve hours ago, I had been an invisible maid carrying a silver tray, terrified of losing a minimum-wage paycheck, bowing my head to a cruel, spoiled socialite.

Now, the most feared mob boss in the Midwest lay bleeding to death on an operating table because he had thrown himself in front of a bullet meant for my chest.

The heavy exterior door at the end of the hallway creaked open.

I looked up, expecting Gianni with reinforcements.

Instead, stepping into the sterile white glare of the hospital corridor, wearing a borrowed trench coat over her ruined evening gown, walked Allison Romano.

She stood at the end of the hall, her hands buried deep in her pockets, her gaze sweeping over my blood-soaked clothes with an expression of profound, devastating solemnity.

“Allison?” I whispered, struggling to stand, leaning against the wall for support. “How did you find this place? Where is Adrian?”

Allison took three slow, measured steps toward me.