No caretaker had lasted more than three days with me after the accident, and I made damn sure of it

The physical therapy room on the third floor smelled of menthol, sweat, and defeat.

It was noon, two days after the hit squad had been turned into fertilizer under an industrial development in Gary. My knuckles were white as I gripped the dual parallel bars, my arms trembling under the strain of holding eighty percent of my body weight off the floor.

"Push through the heel, Dominic," commanded Marcus, a former military physiotherapist whose flat-top haircut and stone-faced demeanor usually brooked no argument. "The neural pathways don't rebuild themselves. You have to force the signal down the cord."

"There is no signal," I gritted through clenched teeth. Sweat was dripping from the tip of my nose, stinging my eyes. My right leg hung completely slack, an anchor of dead flesh dragging me down. "It’s a severed cable, Marcus. You’re asking a broken lamp to turn on without a wire."

"Then we’re done for today," Marcus said, reaching out to support my hip. "You’re fatiguing. You drop now, you tear a rotator cuff, and then you’re truly helpless."

"Don't touch me!" I snarled, trying to heave my dead weight forward one more inch.

My shoulder gave way with a sickening pop of overextended tendon. My grip slipped from the chrome bar, and gravity did the rest.

I hit the high-density foam mat hard, sprawling face-down like a discarded mannequin. The humiliation was an acid wash in my veins, hotter and more poisonous than any physical agony. I lay there, my face pressed into the synthetic rubber, panting, completely unable to roll over without using my arms like crutches.

"Get out, Marcus," I whispered.

"Dominic—"

"I said get the fuck out before I have Carmine throw you off the roof!"

The heavy door clicked shut a moment later.

I didn't move. I stayed there on the floor, my eyes closed, listening to the rhythm of my own ragged breath. In the old days, if an enemy had seen me like this, they would have laughed before putting a round through my ear. Now, the whole world knew. Rossi knew. The capos knew.

A soft rustle of denim approached across the mat.

"You look ridiculous down there," Faith's voice said.

I opened one eye, glaring up at her. She was wearing blue jeans and an old green flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She had a tray with an ice pack, an elastic compression bandage, and a tall glass of ice water.

"Did Carmine send you up here to babysit me?" I hissed, using my forearms to lever myself onto my side.

"Nobody sends me anywhere, Mr. Carter. I brought your lunch, Mrs. Gable said you were up here trying to kill yourself, and I figured I’d come watch." She set the tray on a low stool and sat down cross-legged on the mat, three feet away from me. "Need a hand?"

"I don't need a damn thing from you."

"Good, because you’re heavy, and my back already hurts from scrubbing your stairs." She leaned back against the wall, watching me with those unreadable, deep hazel eyes. "Why do you let him yell at you like that?"

"He doesn't yell at me. He’s trying to do his job."

"He treats you like an engine that needs a spark plug," she said quietly. "My mother had therapists like him. They come in with their charts and their stopwatches, and when the muscles don't twitch on command, they look at you like you failed a high school test. It’s not a machine, Dominic. It’s your body."

Hearing my first name roll off her tongue without hesitation felt like an electric shock against my skin. Nobody called me Dominic anymore—not without adding 'boss' or 'sir,' or spitting it like a curse before dying.

"My body is a broken tool," I said, finally dragging my torso upright until my back hit the base of the parallel bars. I reached for the ice pack, pressing it against my screaming shoulder. "And in my world, broken tools get replaced."

"Then change your world."

I stared at her, genuinely wondering if she was insane. "You have no idea what you’re talking about. I run an empire that controls the supply chain from Toronto to the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of men depend on my word, and fifty more are waiting with knives out to slit my throat the second I blink. If I step back, blood runs in the streets of Chicago until there’s no one left to bury."

"And if you die of a stroke up here on a rubber mat, what happens then?" Faith challenged, leaning forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "The blood runs anyway. Except you won't be around to care."

She was too close. The faint scent of lemon soap and clean rain drifted off her skin, cutting through the sterile stench of the gym. I could see the tiny gold flecks in her irises, and the faint, pale scar near her collarbone—a remnant, perhaps, of the hardscrabble life she had described.

"Why are you still here, Faith?" I asked, my voice losing its razor edge, replaced by a low, gravelly weight. "I almost got you killed two nights ago. You watched a man get his skull cracked open ten feet from your face. A normal girl would have taken her paycheck and caught the first bus out of Illinois."

Faith looked down at her hands. Her fingers were long, delicate, but calloused along the palms from years of physical work.

"My father was a foreman at the South Side lumber yards," she said softly. "When I was twelve, he borrowed twenty thousand dollars from a loan shark named Jimmy 'Tubes' Tartaglione to pay for my mother’s experimental treatments. When the treatments failed and the money ran out, Tartaglione’s men came to our house. They broke my father’s arms with an iron pipe in the kitchen while I hid in the pantry with my hands over my brother’s ears."

A cold stillness settled over me. Tartaglione had been an associate of mine—a low-level enforcer I had personally put down three years ago for skimming kickbacks and running unauthorized extortion rackets.

"My father didn't run," Faith continued, looking back up, her eyes blazing with a fierce, burning light that made her breathtaking. "He went back to work the next week with two casts on his arms. He told me that monsters only control you if you run from the noise they make. If you stand right in front of them and look them in the teeth, they’re just men with bad habits."

She reached out and placed her palm directly over my knee.

It wasn't medical. It wasn't professional. It was raw, human contact, warm and deliberate.

"You’re not a monster, Dominic," she whispered. "You’re just a man who forgot how to live because he’s too busy being terrified of being weak."

I looked down at her hand on my knee. My nerves couldn't register the heat of her skin, but deep within the phantom void of my leg, something shifted. A sensation like a low-voltage spark crackled along the base of my spine, so faint I wasn't sure if it was real or a hallucination born of sheer desire.

I reached out and caught her wrist. I didn't squeeze hard, but I held her there, feeling the rapid, fluttering beat of her pulse beneath my thumb.

"Friday night," I said, my voice dropped to a rough whisper. "You stay close to me. You don't leave my side for an instant. The men in that ballroom make the ones who came through that door look like choirboys."

Faith didn't pull her hand away. A small, defiant smile curved the corner of her lips.