He Hired a Curvy Security Expert to Test His Mansion—By Noon, She Had Broken Into the Mafia Boss’s Home

By 11:15 p.m., the rain had begun to fall over Chicago in heavy, unrelenting sheets.

The black armored SUV raced along the industrial corridor toward the Lake Michigan shipping docks, its tires hissing violently against the wet asphalt. Cal sat in the front passenger seat, cycling through tactical radio channels, while Marco and Tessa sat in the rear.

Marco was wrapping a strip of tactical tape around his split knuckles, his face dark and stony.

Tessa had discarded the emerald gown, changing into a black tactical jumpsuit provided from the SUV's emergency locker. The tight fabric clung to her curves, practical and lethal. Her hair was pulled back, her eyes fixed on the laptop balanced on her lap.

"Enzo has eighty men at Pier 42," Tessa reported, reading the cloned data streams. "They’ve seized your automated container terminals. He’s already staging a shipment of unregistered weapons into the city grid."

"He won't leave the docks alive," Marco said, his voice devoid of all human mercy.

"Marco," Tessa said, placing her warm hand over his taped knuckles.

He looked at her.

"We don't need a bloodbath that brings five hundred federal agents down on your organization," she said calmly, her voice anchoring him. "Enzo’s entire operation relies on the automated gantry cranes. He locked your dispatch office out by scrambling the master SCADA server."

Marco’s eyes narrowed. "Can you take it back?"

"I don't just take it back," Tessa said, her lips curving into that dangerous, brilliant smile he had fallen in love with. "I invert the protocol. I lock down the entire pier from the inside out. His men will be trapped in the shipping yard like rats in a maze."

Cal turned around from the front seat, a wide grin spreading across his face. "Boss, I love her. Can we keep her?"

"Shut up, Cal," Marco said, but the tension in his jaw softened by a millimeter. He turned his hand over, intertwining his fingers with Tessa’s, squeezing tightly. "You stay behind the armored line with Cal."

Tessa raised an eyebrow. "After the stunt I pulled on the fourteenth floor? Marco, you need me at the central relay tower. That’s where the physical server is."

"It’s an active kill zone."

"I am an active hazard," she reminded him. "Trust me."

Marco stared at her.

For fourteen years, Marco Duca had trusted exactly one person: Cal Foster. He had built an empire by suspecting everyone, by keeping his heart armored behind ten inches of hardened steel, by assuming that anyone who got close was looking for a knife to slide between his ribs.

Yet looking into Tessa’s fierce, loyal eyes, Marco felt that steel crumble completely.

"If you die," Marco murmured, his voice so quiet only she could hear over the rumble of the engine, "I will burn this entire city to ash."

"Then don't let me die," she whispered back.

The SUV screeched to a halt outside the massive iron gates of Pier 42.

Before the gate guards could raise their rifles, Cal rammed the armored bumper through the barrier with a deafening crash of screaming metal.

Gunfire erupted instantly.

Muzzle flashes strobed through the pouring rain, bullets pinging off the reinforced ballistic glass of the SUV. Marco didn't wait. He kicked his door open, rolling out into the shadows of a massive row of stacked shipping containers, his submachine gun barking in precise, lethal bursts.

"Move!" Marco roared over the din of the firefight.

Cal laid down covering fire, sweeping the catwalks with suppressive rounds while Marco pushed forward, shielding Tessa with his own body as they sprinted across the rain-slicked concrete toward the concrete base of the gantry control tower.

A sniper on the gantry above zeroed in on Marco’s position.

"Down!" Tessa screamed.

She shoved Marco hard against a steel beam just as a high-caliber round slammed into the concrete where his head had been a microsecond earlier, showering them in stone dust.

Without missing a beat, Tessa unholstered her Glock, leaned out from behind the beam, and fired three rapid shots upward into the rain.

The sniper crumpled over the safety rail, dropping forty feet into the dark waters of the harbor below.

Marco looked at the fallen sniper, then looked at Tessa.

"Center-mass grouping," she said, winking through the rain.

"Marry me," Marco growled.

Tessa blinked, caught entirely off guard. "What?"