At 1:47 in the morning, I caught my housekeeper’s six-year-old daughter secretly cleaning my forbidden office with her baby sister tied to her back because she believed one unfinished room would cost her family their home. But before I could discover why her mother had disappeared, the little girl pointed at my bookcase and asked why a woman was crying inside a room no outsider knew existed.

I summoned my chief of security, Frank Mercer, through an encrypted radio channel. Within ten minutes, eight of my most trusted men—former military operators who had guarded my perimeter for a decade—were positioned silently throughout the hallways of the Beacon Hill mansion.

I moved Grace, Mia, and Lily to my personal master suite on the third floor—a reinforced panic room with bulletproof steel doors and direct access to an underground escape tunnel.

Mia stood by the giant king-sized bed, clutching a stuffed bear my housekeeper had kept in the nursery.

"Mr. Duca?" she asked, her small voice echoing in the vast room.

"Yes, Mia?"

"Are you going to hurt the man with the scar?"

I knelt in front of her, gently smoothing down her messy dark hair. "I am going to make sure he never frightens you or your mother ever again. I promise you that."

Mia looked at me with wide, innocent eyes, then did something that completely shattered the cold wall I had built around my heart for thirty-eight years.

She leaned forward and wrapped her tiny arms around my neck.

"Thank you for finding my Mama," she whispered into my shoulder.

I froze for a second, unaccustomed to genuine warmth, before wrapping my arms around her small frame, feeling the delicate rise and fall of her breath.

"Get some sleep, little one," I murmured, standing up and closing the reinforced door behind me.

At 2:55 AM, the power to the mansion was abruptly cut.

The grand crystal chandeliers turned dark. The security monitors went black.

Outside, a heavy autumn rain pounded against the leaded glass windows.

I stood inside my second-floor study, concealed in the deep shadows behind the heavy velvet drapes near the window. The secret bookcase was still pushed open slightly, revealing the dark opening of the vault.

A soft, scraping sound echoed from the grand staircase.

Footsteps. Heavy, confident, and slow.

A flashlight beam sliced through the darkness of the hallway, casting long, grotesque shadows across the mahogany floorboards.

Victor Duca stepped into my study.

He was sixty-two, tall, wearing an expensive camel-hair coat, his silver hair neatly slicked back. Across his left hand, the jagged crescent scar gleamed pale in the flashlight beam.

Behind him stood two heavy-set enforcers carrying suppressed automatic pistols.

Victor walked straight to the open bookcase, a wicked, triumphant smirk spreading across his face.

"Grace, you miserable bitch," Victor called into the vault, his gravelly voice dripping with malice. "Did forty-eight hours in the dark clear your memory? Are you ready to tell me where Roman keeps the second key?"

Silence answered him from the vault.

Victor frowned, stepping closer to the concrete opening. "Don't play games with me! If you don't answer, I’m going downstairs right now and dropping your little girls off the Harvard Bridge!"