"Twenty-six guests watched as the feared Mafia boss dropped to his knees and held his supposedly dead dog—then his security chief revealed someone had been paid to collect another animal.

“Down!” Dante roared.

The heavy bay windows of Luca’s study exploded inward in a blizzard of pulverized glass and lead.

The ear-splitting staccato of automatic gunfire ripped through the room. Curtains were torn to ribbons; plaster rained from the ceiling in chalky white clouds; priceless oil paintings were shredded into confetti within seconds.

The moment the glass shattered, I felt a massive weight slam into me.

Luca tackled me to the floor, wrapping his arms around my head and torso, using his own heavy, bulletproof-lined body to completely shield me from the spray of glass and high-caliber rounds.

Beneath me, the hardwood shook. Above us, the rounds chewed through his mahogany desk, sending splinters flying across the room.

Across the rug, Bruno let out an explosive, deafening roar of fury. Despite his age and aching joints, the old dog scrambled to his feet, lunging toward the shattered window, his teeth bared in a feral snarl.

“Bruno, HEEL!” Luca shouted through the deafening roar of the gunfire, not letting go of me for a single second. “DANTE!”

“Suppressing!” Dante yelled from behind an overturned marble credenza. He raised a tactical submachine gun and returned fire through the shattered window frame, the brass casings clattering across the floor in a rhythmic cascade.

From the gardens below, shouts in Italian echoed, followed by the screech of tires and the heavy thunder of the estate’s secondary security team responding with heavy rifles.

The assault lasted less than forty-five seconds.

In the world of high-level mob hits, if an ambush doesn’t achieve its objective within a minute, the attackers must retreat or face encirclement. The roar of a high-performance engine squealed down the driveway, followed by the dull thud of an explosion at the far end of the property as the perimeter security blew the tires off one of the fleeing vehicles.

The room fell into a terrifying, ringing silence.

Dust and cordite smoke hung thick in the air, smelling of sulfur and burnt wood.

“Emma,” a voice rasped above me. “Emma, look at me. Are you hit?”

I opened my eyes, coughing against the smoke. Luca was hovering over me, his hands frantically scanning my shoulders, my arms, my torso. His dark hair was coated in white drywall dust, his suit ripped across the back where flying glass shards had sliced through the wool.

“I... I’m okay,” I gasped, trembling violently. “I’m not hit. Mr. Moretti, are you—”

I stopped.

My hand, which was resting against his shoulder, came away slick and hot with dark, thick blood.

“You’re bleeding,” I cried, the sight of his blood triggering an instinct deeper than my fear. “You’ve been shot!”

“Shrapnel,” Luca muttered through gritted teeth, though a grimace of pain tightened his features. “A glass shard caught the back of my shoulder. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing!” I scrambled out from under him, ignoring the shards of glass digging through my apron into my knees. “Dante! Get the trauma kit from the hallway! Now!”

Dante, who had already cleared the window frame and was scanning the smoky garden below, looked back. Seeing the blood soaking through Luca’s shirt, his jaw clenched. “On it.”

Luca tried to push himself up, but I put both hands firmly on his uninjured shoulder and pushed him back down onto the floor.

“Stay still!” I commanded.

Luca blinked at me, utterly stunned. In his entire life, no one—except perhaps his late father—had ever dared to order him around, let alone push him to the floor.

“Emma,” he said, his voice a mix of warning and shock. “I am the head of the Moretti family.”

“And right now you’re a patient bleeding on a rug,” I snapped back, ripping the clean hem of my undershirt with both hands, tearing away a long strip of white cotton. “Hold still or you’re going to hemorrhage into your rotator cuff.”

For a beat, Luca stared at me with pure astonishment. Then, slowly, the tension in his face cracked, and he let out a low, breathless laugh that ended in a wince.

“God help me,” he muttered, resting his forehead against the floor. “I hired a general.”

Dante ran back into the room, tossing a military-grade medical kit onto the floor beside me. Bruno came trotting over, whining softly, nudging Luca’s hand with his wet nose. Luca reached out with his uninjured hand, gently curling his fingers around Bruno’s ear.

“Good boy,” Luca whispered. “You held the line, Bruno.”

With trembling but precise hands, I cut away the bloody fabric of Luca’s shirt. A three-inch jagged piece of reinforced window glass was lodged deep in the muscular tissue between his shoulder blade and neck. It had missed his jugular by less than two inches.

“This is going to hurt,” I warned, pulling sterile forceps and a clotting sponge from the kit.

Luca looked back at me over his shoulder, his eyes dark, intense, and completely fearless. “Do it.”

I didn't hesitate. I braced his shoulder with one hand and drew the glass shard out in a single, smooth, decisive motion. Blood welled up immediately, but I packed the wound with the hemostatic sponge, applying firm, continuous pressure with both palms.

Luca didn't scream. He didn't even groan. He merely gripped the leg of his shattered desk until the wood splintered beneath his fingers, his veins bulging against his neck.

“Hold the pressure,” I told Dante, who immediately took over the bandage. I quickly unwrapped an antiseptic suture kit, threaded the curved needle, and washed my hands with surgical alcohol.

“Emma,” Luca murmured, his voice strained. “You don’t have to sew it. Harris will be here in twenty minutes.”

“Harris is twenty minutes away. Infection in a deep laceration like this takes twenty seconds,” I replied cleanly, wiping the excess blood away. “Bite on something if you need to.”

“I don’t bite on things,” Luca growled softly.

I began stitching. My father’s training took over—the muscle memory of sewing torn tissue on farm dogs and injured livestock under dim barn lights. With neat, tiny, perfectly placed stitches, I pulled the ragged edges of his flesh back together.

Throughout the entire procedure, Luca never looked away from my face.

Even through the pain, his gaze was so burning, so completely focused on me, that my hands nearly wavered. He wasn’t looking at a maid. He wasn’t even looking at an employee.

He was looking at the woman who held his life in her hands—and who hadn't run away when the bullets started flying.

Just as I tied off the final knot, the heavy front doors downstairs swung open, accompanied by the panicked cries of a young man.

“Emma! Emma! Where is she? Let me go!”