2At 9:17 P.M., I was the only waitress brave enough to approach table four, where Boston's most feared mafia boss was slowly dying in front of everyone.

The safehouse was hidden beneath the floorboards of an abandoned marine repair shop on the Chelsea Creek waterfront.

It wasn't luxurious like the mansion. It was cold, smelled of stale motor oil and damp concrete, and was lit only by a pair of buzzing fluorescent strip lights hanging from exposed steel rafters. But it was fortified: twelve-inch steel doors, bulletproof glass, and an independent radio jammer that kept our location invisible to Salvatore’s digital tracking sweeps.

In the corner of the room, Dr. Rossi, a silver-haired physician who had been the Romano family's private surgeon for thirty years, finished stitching Matteo’s shoulder.

"The bullet passed clean through the deltoid, Dominic," Dr. Rossi said, wiping his surgical instruments with antiseptic. "No bone fragmentation. He’ll live, but he’s out of the fight for at least three weeks."

"Get him to the safehouse in New Hampshire," Dominic ordered, standing near a rusted workbench covered in tactical maps and paper blueprints of downtown Boston. "Take Marco's car. Use the back roads."

"Understood," Dr. Rossi nodded, packing his leather medical bag. He looked at Dominic with grave eyes. "Be careful, Dominic. The word on the street is ugly. Salvatore has convened an emergency meeting of the Five Families' regional commission for tomorrow night at the Lenox Hotel. He’s presenting forged documents claiming you embezzled forty million from the union pensions, and that you orchestrated the warehouse fire to cover your tracks."

"He’s legitimizing his coup," Dominic said coldly. "If the commission backs him, every crew from Providence to New York will have a green light to hunt me down."

"He already put a bounty on the street," the doctor added, glancing nervously toward me. "Five million for you, dead or alive. And one million for the girl."

My heart seized. "A million dollars? On me?"

Dominic’s head snapped toward me, his jaw clenching with such ferocity that the muscle jumped in his cheek. He walked across the concrete floor, stopping directly in front of my chair.

"Nobody is collecting that bounty, Chloe," he said, his voice laced with venom aimed at the unseen world outside. "Anyone who looks at you with that intent will be dead before they can draw a breath."

He turned back to the doctor. "Get Matteo out of here. Now."

Once the doctor and the two injured guards had slipped out into the pre-dawn mist, only Dominic, Marco, and I remained in the subterranean bunker.

Dominic slowly peeled off his soaked dress shirt, tossing it onto a wooden crate. Beneath it, his torso was an intricate map of muscle, old scars, and violent bruises. Across his left shoulder blade was an elaborate black tattoo of a crowned lion clutching a broken spear—the ancient Romano family crest.

Along his left rib cage, however, was a deep, jagged gash from the blade fight on the boat that was slowly seeping dark blood down his side.

He reached for a bottle of medical alcohol and a roll of gauze, but his left arm seized with a sharp spasm of pain, and the bottle slipped from his fingers.

I stepped forward before it hit the floor, catching it in mid-air.

Dominic looked at me, his slate eyes clouded with frustration and fatigue. "I can manage it, Chloe."

"Sit down, Dominic," I said. My voice wasn't loud, but it was steady—the tone I had used a hundred times when my mother was too proud to admit she needed help taking her medication.

Dominic blinked, clearly unaccustomed to anyone speaking to him with authority. For a moment, the dangerous mafia boss looked ready to argue. Then, slowly, the tension drained from his shoulders, and he sat down on the edge of a wooden tool bench.

I pulled up a metal stool, poured antiseptic onto a clean cotton pad, and knelt beside him.

"This is going to sting," I warned.

"I've felt worse," he muttered.

I pressed the pad against the open wound. Dominic flinched slightly, his abdomen muscles tightening like armor plating, but he didn't make a sound. His eyes stayed locked on my face as I worked.

"You have very gentle hands," he murmured, his voice dropping into that low, intoxicating register that made it hard for me to concentrate on what I was doing.

"I took care of my mother for three years," I replied softly, keeping my eyes fixed on the wound as I cleaned away the blood. "When the cancer spread, she couldn't dress her own surgical drains. I learned how to clean wounds, change IV bags, and give morphine injections. In another life, I probably would have gone to nursing school."

"Why didn't you?"

I let out a bitter, quiet chuckle as I picked up the medical needle and sterile suture thread the doctor had left behind. "Because nursing school costs forty thousand dollars a year, Dominic. And my father walked out when I was twelve, leaving us with sixty thousand dollars in credit card debt. In my world, you don't chase dreams. You pay the electric bill and pray the landlord forgets your rent is five days late."

Dominic fell silent. His gaze traveled over my face, studying the shadows under my eyes, the set of my jaw.

"Your world shouldn't have been that hard," he said, and for the first time, I heard genuine sorrow in his voice. "A girl with your spirit deserved better than being Richard’s punching bag at a corrupt steakhouse."

"Speaking of Richard," Marco interrupted from across the room, looking up from an encrypted laptop connected to a high-gain satellite receiver. "I just intercepted an unencrypted cellular ping off a tower in the Theater District. It’s registered to a burner phone purchased three days ago by Richard Vance."

I froze, the suture needle hovering an inch from Dominic’s skin. "Richard? My manager?"

"Where is he, Marco?" Dominic asked, his entire demeanor shifting from quiet vulnerability back to lethal predator in a microsecond.

"He just checked into the executive suite at the Liberty Hotel," Marco answered, tapping the keys. "And get this—the room was paid for with a corporate credit card belonging to one of Salvatore’s shell holding companies. Salvatore’s enforcers are keeping Richard tucked away until tomorrow night’s commission meeting. Richard is supposed to testify that Chloe was an undercover assassin planted by you to poison yourself and blame Salvatore."

A wave of pure disgust washed over me. "Richard is going to tell the mafia bosses that *I* tried to kill you?"

"Salvatore needs a narrative," Dominic said coldly, his eyes turning to black ice. "If he can convince the commission that I staged my own assassination attempt to justify purging his faction, they’ll sanction my execution. Richard is the loose end that ties Salvatore’s lie together."

I finished the final stitch, pulled the thread tight, and knotted it cleanly before cutting the excess with surgical scissors. "Then what do we do?"

Dominic stood up, rolling his broad shoulders. He looked down at the neat, professional row of black sutures across his ribs, then met my eyes.

"We go to the Liberty Hotel," Dominic said. "We snatch Richard from under Salvatore’s nose. And we make him sing the truth before the commission convenes."

"He won't be alone, Boss," Marco warned, checking his sidearm. "Salvatore will have at least four heavy hitters guarding that suite."

"Then we don't go through the front door," Dominic replied. He looked at me, a dangerous, brilliant spark in his dark eyes. "Chloe, you worked with Richard for two years. Tell me about his habits. How does a cowardly, arrogant middle-manager act when he suddenly thinks he's a made man?"

A memory clicked in my mind—something Richard used to boast about during late-night inventory counts.

"He’s a severe diabetic," I said slowly, the pieces falling into place. "And an addict. He drinks top-shelf bourbon to cope with his stress, but every night at exactly four in the morning, his blood sugar crashes. He always orders a fresh pot of hot black coffee and two room-service club sandwiches with extra mayo. He refuses to eat anything else."

Dominic stared at me, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face.