Two years after a sniper’s bullet stole the use of my legs, everyone inside my estate had learned to fear me—nurses quit, therapists fled, and even armed men lowered their eyes when I entered a room. Then a new maid named Emma walked into my private wing, looked straight at the man everyone called a monster, and said, “Do you want me to stop working? Because if I stop, I don’t get paid.”

The attack in the alley changed the game. Victor Rosas knew I had left my estate, which meant he knew his psychological grip on me was broken.

When we returned to the estate, I had Mercer attend to the small cut on Emma's lip while I locked myself in the war room with Luke and our chief of security, a former Special Forces operator named Hayes.

"How did Rosas' men know her exact train route?" I demanded, staring at the digital blueprint of my estate projected onto the wall. "She didn't tell anyone except the house staff."

"It could have been a lucky street tail," Hayes offered quickly, stepping forward. He was a broad-shouldered man in his late forties who had been on my payroll for five years. "Rosas has eyes on every train station in the North Side."

"Or it was a leak," Luke countered sharply. "Her schedule was logged in the internal house server at 2:00 PM. By 4:00 PM, they were waiting for her."

Hayes scowled, looking toward the door where Emma was sitting in the outer office. "If you want my professional opinion, Boss, you brought a wild card into this house. She was drowning in debt to Rosas' people three weeks ago. How do we know she isn't handing him your schedule to buy her family's freedom?"

"Watch your tongue, Hayes," I said softly, my voice dropping like a hammer.

"I'm just protecting you, Danny!" Hayes insisted, stepping closer to my desk. "You've changed since she got here. You're throwing money around, taking armored convoys onto public streets, making noise. You're vulnerable!"

"She took a punch for keeping her mouth shut ten minutes ago," I said flatly. "If she was working for Victor, she would have handed him my private access codes weeks ago. She stays. Find the leak."

That night, at two in the morning, the phantom pain returned to my legs with vengeance.

It felt like someone was driving white-hot iron spikes through my kneecaps and burning the soles of my feet with a blowtorch. I sat in my wheelchair in the dark study, sweat pouring off my chin, gripping the armrests until my knuckles turned white, refusing to scream.

The door softly clicked open.

Emma walked in, wearing a dark gray sweater and leggings, carrying a warm mug of tea and a small towel. She didn't ask if I was in pain. She saw the stance of my body and immediately went to work.

She knelt in front of my chair, wrapped the warm towel around my icy, trembling hands, and set the tea on the desk.

"Breathe, Danny," she whispered softly, resting her small, warm palms gently on my paralyzed knees.

"Don't touch them," I grunted through gritted teeth. "I can't feel you anyway."

"I know," she said quietly, looking up into my eyes. "But I can feel you shaking. Let me stay."

I closed my eyes, letting her warmth ground me while the agonizing fire raged through my severed nerves. For twenty minutes, neither of us said a word. She just knelt there, holding my knees, anchoring me to reality.

Suddenly, a faint, rhythmic clicking sound echoed from the hallway outside the private study—the silent electronic lock of the primary server room down the hall being bypassed.

Emma's head snapped toward the door. "Did you authorize someone to be in the server wing at 2:30 AM?"

My pain vanished, replaced instantly by cold adrenaline. I reached into my desk drawer, pulled out the heavy SIG Sauer, and handed it to Emma.

"Stay behind the desk," I commanded in a low whisper.

"Danny, you can't go down there alone—"

"I am not alone," I said, hitting a silent alarm on my watch that alerted Luke's private unit, then rolling my chair silently out into the carpeted hallway.

I navigated the dark corridor like a ghost on rubber wheels. The door to the main server vault was cracked open, a faint blue light spilling onto the floorboards.

Inside, a man was crouching over the primary mainframe, plugging a encrypted military-grade drive into the master port to download my syndicate’s financial records and security clearance codes.

He turned around when my chair blocked the doorway.

It was Hayes.

"Looking for something, Chief?" I asked smoothly, resting my hands on my lap.

Hayes froze, his eyes darting frantically toward the secondary emergency exit. "Danny... you shouldn't be up."

"And you shouldn't be selling my life to Victor Rosas for two million dollars in a Swiss account," I said. "Luke tracked the offshore ping ten minutes ago. You've been feeding him my medical updates for six months."

Hayes' face twisted from shock into a desperate, feral sneer. He reached for the sidearm holstered at his chest. "You're a useless half-man sitting in a rolling chair, Vance! Victor is taking this city, and I'm not dying in this fortress with a ghost!"

He drew his gun.

Before he could raise his barrel, a loud, deafening BANG echoed through the narrow hallway.

A bullet tore through Hayes' right shoulder, shattering his collarbone and knocking him backward into the server rack, his gun clattering across the floor.

I turned my head.

Emma was standing ten feet behind my chair, both hands locked around the SIG Sauer, smoke wafting from the barrel, her arms trembling violently, but her jaw set in pure, terrifying resolve.

"I told you," Emma whispered, her voice shaking with adrenaline as Luke and six armed operators flooded the corridor behind her, "nobody touches him."