Dominic fired back.

Every shot controlled.

Every movement lethal.

“Rocco, east hall!”

Rocco fired twice and vanished through smoke.

“Cassidy,” Dominic shouted. “Take Bella to the library. Panic room. Go!”

“I don’t know where—”

“Left corridor. Second door. Move!”

Cassidy grabbed a steak knife from the floor.

Dominic saw it.

Something like fear flashed across his face.

“Run.”

She ran.

The hallway was a blur of smoke, marble, screaming alarms, and expensive wallpaper shredded by bullets. Bella’s hand was slippery in hers. Cassidy’s lungs burned. She was not brave in a clean way. She was terrified. She wanted to hide, cry, wake up in her shoebox apartment with bills and stale coffee and no gunfire.

But Bella was running beside her.

So Cassidy did not stop.

The library doors stood ahead.

Huge.

Dark.

She shoved them open and pushed Bella inside.

“Under the desk,” Cassidy said. “Now. Don’t come out.”

Bella scrambled beneath the mahogany desk and curled into the darkness.

Cassidy turned to lock the doors.

Too late.

One kicked open hard enough to hit the wall.

Enzo stood there with a pistol.

Not bleeding.

Not panicked.

Smiling.

Cassidy’s stomach dropped.

“You.”

He stepped inside and kicked the door shut.

“Going somewhere, sweetheart?”

“You let them in.”

“Dominic is getting old,” Enzo said. “He has soft spots now. That makes him weak.”

“Mickey O’Shea bought you.”

“O’Shea understands ambition.”

“He trusts you?”

Enzo laughed. “No one trusts anyone. That’s why business works.”

He raised the gun.

“Move away from the desk.”

Cassidy tightened her grip on the steak knife.

“No.”

“You have a dinner knife. I have a nine-millimeter.”

“You’ll have to shoot me.”

His smile changed.

“You think Dominic will hear? Rocco took a bullet in the throat. Dominic is probably bleeding out by now.”

Bella trembled under the desk.

Cassidy felt it against her ankle.

Enzo lunged, not shooting, but swinging the gun toward Cassidy’s face.

He saw a waitress.

He did not see the girl who had grown up in South Chicago dodging drunk men outside bars, learning that small women survived by moving toward danger when men expected them to move back.

Cassidy ducked into him and slashed the steak knife across his forearm.

Enzo screamed.

The gun hit the floor and skidded beneath a leather chair.

“You bitch!”

He backhanded her.

Pain burst white behind Cassidy’s eyes.

She crashed into a bookshelf. Books fell around her. Her mouth filled with blood.

Enzo pulled a switchblade with his good hand.

“I’m going to make you sorry.”

Cassidy tried to stand.

Her legs failed.

Behind him, Bella crawled halfway from beneath the desk, eyes wide.

“No,” Cassidy whispered.

Enzo raised the knife.

A gunshot cracked through the library.

Enzo stiffened.

A dark red flower opened on his white shirt.

He turned, confused, almost offended.

Dominic stood in the doorway.

His jacket was gone. His white shirt was soaked with blood, some his, most not. Smoke curled from the gun in his hand. His face had emptied of everything human except purpose.

“Dominic,” Enzo choked. “It was business.”

“You touched my family.”

The second shot dropped him before his body hit the carpet.

Dominic did not look at the corpse.

He crossed the room and fell to his knees beside Cassidy.

His hands cupped her face.

“Look at me. Are you hit?”

“He hit me,” she managed. “But I’m okay. Bella—”

Bella rushed from beneath the desk and threw herself into Dominic’s arms.

He held her with one arm and Cassidy with the other, breathing hard, blood soaking through his shirt.

For one second, he was not the mafia boss.

Not the king.

Not the ghost story.

He was a father who had almost lost the only part of his life still capable of breaking him.

“We have to go,” he said.

“The house?”

“Compromised.”

He went to the bookshelf and pulled a leather volume titled
The History of Rome
.

The shelf clicked.

A hidden door opened into darkness.

Cassidy stared.

“You have a tunnel?”

“I built this house for war.”

He grabbed a flashlight.

“I hoped not to use it.”

The tunnel smelled of earth, damp stone, and old fear. They ran as much as Dominic could run with blood spreading at his side. The passage opened nearly a mile away into a drainage ditch near woods behind the estate. Rain had started, cold Chicago rain that soaked Cassidy’s dress and plastered Bella’s hair to her face.

An old Ford waited beneath a tarp in a maintenance shed.

No armor.

No luxury.

A ghost car.

Dominic drove with one hand.

Cassidy saw the blood then.

A dark stain spreading above his hip.

“You’re shot.”

“Grazed.”

“That’s not a graze.”

He ignored her.

They reached a warehouse apartment in the old meatpacking district before midnight. Third floor. Green door. Mattress on the floor. Canned food. First aid kit. No decoration. A place meant for survival, not living.

Dominic made it two steps inside before collapsing.

Bella opened her mouth in a silent scream.

Cassidy dropped beside him.

“Let me see.”

The wound was ugly.

Not fatal if handled.

Fatal if not.

“I can’t,” Cassidy whispered.

Dominic’s face was gray.

“You can.”

“I’ve never stitched anything but buttons.”

“Then pretend I’m an expensive shirt.”

She almost laughed.

Then cried instead.

He pushed the first aid kit toward her.

“Needle. Thread. Whiskey.”

Cassidy cleaned the wound while Bella sobbed silently into a blanket. Dominic poured whiskey over the torn flesh and made a sound that would haunt Cassidy for years. She threaded the needle with shaking fingers, took one breath, and pushed it through skin.

For twenty minutes, the room was rain, blood, and breathing.