THE MAFIA BOSS WATCHED ME BUTTON HIS ELDERLY MOTHER’S CARDIGAN WITH TWO SWOLLEN FINGERS—THEN HIS FIANCÉE SAID, “SHE JAMMED THEM IN THE MEDICINE DRAWER.”

The air in the room didn’t just grow cold; it thinned out until drawing a breath felt like swallowing crushed ice.

Isabella didn’t blink. That was her first mistake. Guilt usually made people look away, but Isabella was bred in penthouses and private schools where looking away was a sign of bad breeding. Instead, she stared straight into Luca’s dark eyes, her manicured chin tilted at a defiant angle.

“I heard the commotion from the hallway, Luca,” she said smoothly, her voice shedding its earlier velvet warmth and taking on a brittle, defensive sheen. “I was walking past Teresa’s suite to get ready for dinner. I heard a drawer slam, I heard a gasp, and when I looked in, the little maid was sniffling over the mahogany dresser. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.”

“A drawer slammed,” Luca repeated. His voice was low, devoid of inflection. That was the tone he used when he was deciding whether to ruin someone’s life or merely humiliate them. “You heard a drawer slam from the hallway, yet you didn’t step inside to check on my eighty-one-year-old mother?”

Isabella’s throat bobbed. A faint, almost imperceptible twitch pulled at the corner of her crimson lips. “I saw that Emma was with her. I assumed it was handled. I have a makeup artist waiting in the west wing, Luca. Must we conduct a federal deposition over a clumsy maid?”

“She isn’t a maid,” Teresa said from her cream-colored chair. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried the weight of fifty years ruling Chicago’s old south side alongside Luca’s late father. “Emma is my companion. She was hired by my personal recommendation. And she doesn’t cry over clumsy mistakes, Isabella.”

Luca took half a step forward. The polished Italian leather of his shoes made no sound against the Persian rug. He towered over his fiancée, broad shoulders blotting out the warm glow of the chandelier behind him. The rolled-up sleeves of his shirt revealed the sprawling ink on his forearms—vines, thorns, and an old Latin phrase his grandfather had carved into stone decades ago: *Vindicatio non dormit.* Vengeance does not sleep.

“You didn’t mention the hallway before,” Luca murmured, his gaze tracing the sharp contours of Isabella’s face. “You said she must have told one of the staff. Now you say you heard it yourself.”

“I misspoke!” Isabella snapped, her temper finally cracking through her high-society veneer. She smoothed the skirt of her ruby red satin dress with trembling fingers. “I’ve been planning our engagement gala for three weeks straight. I have caterers threatening strikes, florists flying orchids in from Ecuador, and a hundred board members expecting me to look radiant tonight. Forgive me if I don’t keep an accurate mental diary of every servant’s afternoon clumsiness!”

“That’s enough,” Luca said quietly.

The two words silenced the room instantly.

Luca didn’t look back at Isabella. He didn’t look at his mother. He turned entirely toward me.

I wanted the parquet floor to open up and swallow me whole. I was twenty-four years old, wearing an eight-dollar clearance cardigan and orthopedic nursing sneakers, standing between one of the most ruthless men in the Midwest and his blue-blood fiancée. My right hand was tucked into my apron pocket, but the fire in my fingers was radiating all the way up to my elbow. My pulse hammered in my fingertips with a sickening, sickening thud.

“Emma,” Luca said.

“Yes, Mr. Moretti.”

“Take your hand out of your pocket.”

I hesitated. I looked at Teresa, but the matriarch gave me a firm, gentle nod. Slowly, reluctantly, I drew my hand out into the lamplight.

Up close, under the direct beam of the chandelier, it looked worse than I realized. The skin across the knuckles of my middle and ring fingers had stretched tight, glossy with swelling. The color was shifting from an angry mottled plum to deep, bruising black. Even the simple act of holding my wrist level sent a jolt of nausea through my stomach.

Luca reached out.

His hands were twice the size of mine, calloused along the palms and scarred across the knuckles from a youth spent doing things he no longer had to do himself. I expected him to be rough—men like him were blunt instruments, built for force. But when his long fingers slipped beneath my wrist, his touch was feather-light. His skin was warm.

He didn’t squeeze. He simply supported my forearm, using his thumb to gently turn my palm upward.

I couldn’t help it. A small, ragged breath escaped my lips.

Luca’s eyes flicked to my face. The pupils were dilated, black pools fringed by dark lashes. “Does it burn, or is it sharp?”

“Both,” I whispered, staring at the collar of his shirt rather than his eyes. “It’s just pinched, sir. Ice will help.”

“Two fractured phalanges aren’t fixed with ice,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. He tilted my fingers just a fraction of an inch, testing the joint. When my knees buckled slightly from the sudden jolt of agony, his other hand caught my elbow, holding me upright before I could drop.

Behind us, Isabella let out a sharp, theatrical scoff. “Oh, please. Look at her playing the helpless sparrow. Luca, let her go down to the staff infirmary and have the night nurse wrap it. We have guests arriving in forty minutes.”

Luca didn’t let go of my wrist. In fact, his fingers tightened by a millimeter—not enough to hurt, but enough to anchor me.

He turned his head slightly, speaking over his shoulder toward the door where two security guards in bespoke charcoal suits had silently appeared, drawn by the tension.

“Call Dr. Evans,” Luca ordered.

“Sir?” the guard on the left, a burly man named Dante, blinked. “Dr. Evans is the chief of orthopedic surgery at Northwestern. He’s already in his tuxedo for your gala downstairs.”

“Then he won’t have to travel far,” Luca said, his voice cold and flat. “Tell him to bring a portable x-ray kit and a splint to my private study. Immediately.”

“Luca!” Isabella gasped, taking an outraged step forward. “You are pulling the head of surgery away from our welcoming cocktail for a maid’s sprained knuckle? Do you have any idea how that looks? Senator Vance is downstairs right now!”

Luca finally released my wrist. He turned fully toward his bride-to-be.

When he looked at her, there was no anger in his face. That was what made Luca Moretti terrifying. When he was truly furious, he became completely still, like deep water before a sudden drown.

“I don’t care about Senator Vance,” Luca said, each syllable carved from granite. “I don’t care about the orchids from Ecuador. And right now, Isabella, I am very close to not caring about this engagement gala.”

Isabella went paper-white. The color drained so rapidly from her cheeks that her bronzer looked like two streaks of rust against porcelain. “You wouldn’t dare humiliate my family like that.”

“Try me,” Luca whispered.

Teresa cleared her throat from the chair. The old woman picked up her silver tea bell and set it down with a firm click against the mahogany side table. “Isabella, go downstairs and greet your mother. She’s been complaining about the vintage of the champagne since four o'clock. Luca, take Emma to your study. I will not have my living quarters turned into a circus before dinner.”

Isabella stood frozen for another three seconds, her eyes burning daggers into the side of my head. If looks had mass, my skull would have caved in. She spun on her designer heels, the satin of her gown hissing against the carpet, and stormed down the corridor.

The heavy oak door didn’t slam, but the draft she left behind fluttered the lace curtains.

Luca looked down at me again. The dark intensity in his eyes hadn’t softened, but the cold edge had shifted into something else—something intensely focused, protective, and dangerous.