In front of seventy employees, my mafia boss's jealous fiancée grabbed my hair and cut off the braid I'd grown for years to honor my dead grandmother.

I didn't cry.

Adrian stood behind me, his chest heaving, his shadow engulfing the broken shrine as rain dripped from the brim of his coat. He expected me to shatter. He reached out to pull me away, his voice raw with guilt. "Elena... I will burn this entire city to the ground. I swear to you—"

"Don't swear," I whispered, kneeling in the mud.

My fingers didn't tremble as I reached out and yanked the heavy combat knife from the stone. The blade was German steel, engraved with a serpent coiled around a fractured skull—Julian's private insignia. I wiped the wet dirt from my grandmother’s empty brass urn and held it against my ribs.

"He wants me emotional," I said, standing up and looking Adrian dead in the eyes. "He desecrated my family to provoke you into charging his stronghold blindly. That's what Bianca did. That's what Silvio tried to do. They think my grief is a weakness."

I turned the heavy blade in my hand, feeling the balance of the steel.

"Julian didn't take her ashes, Adrian. Look." I pointed down. The gray powder was scattered on the grass, but right beneath the niche, half-buried under the sod, was a small black plastic casing blinking with a tiny red diode.

"Get down!" Adrian shouted, throwing his body over mine and tackling me into the muddy embankment.

The explosive wasn't high-yield—it was an anti-personnel fragmentation mine designed to maim whoever came to grieve. The blast ripped through the air with a deafening *CRACK*, sending dirt and stone shards showering over Adrian's broad back.

He absorbed the debris without a sound, his body an impenetrable shield over mine. When the smoke cleared, he pushed himself up, his eyes ablaze with demonic fury, a thin line of red trickling down his temple where a piece of flying stone had grazed his skin.

"Marcus," Adrian barked into his earpiece, helping me up with terrifying calm. "Call Silvio Valenti on his personal secure line. Now."

Three minutes later, Marcus handed Adrian the satellite phone inside the armored SUV. The rain hammered against the reinforced roof.

"Adrian?" Silvio's voice trembled through the receiver. The former mafia aristocrat sounded broken, frantic. "Listen to me, Adrian, I didn't authorize the cemetery! Julian is a madman! He brought his Neapolitan butchers into my penthouse! They have guns to my sister's head—"

"Shut your mouth, Silvio," Adrian said smoothly. "You made a deal with a devil because you were too weak to accept your defeat. Now listen to me very carefully. My wife has the serial numbers to your offshore accounts in Panama and Grand Cayman. Within fifteen minutes, I can release those numbers to the Department of Justice and the federal task force tracking your laundering."

"No! That's everything I have left!" Silvio shrieked. "Bianca and I will spend the rest of our lives in ADX Florence!"

"Then give me Julian's staging ground," Adrian replied, cold as ice. "Give me the coordinates of his command center before midnight, or I swear on my mother's grave, I will let Julian slaughter you, and then I will feed what's left of your empire to the federal wolves."

A frantic pause stretched over the line. In the background, the faint sound of glass shattering and a woman’s muffled scream could be heard—Bianca, paying for her arrogance under the heel of the very monster she helped summon.

"He's at the Old Navy Yard," Silvio sobbed, his voice cracking. "Dry Dock 4. He's loading heavy arms from a cargo freighter under a Liberian flag. He plans to hit your estate at dawn with thermite charges!"

Adrian hung up without another word. He tossed the phone to Marcus.