A fortress pretending to be tasteful.

Mason arrived fifteen minutes later with blood darkening his sleeve.

“You’re shot,” Ava said before she could stop herself.

Mason glanced at his arm.

“Scratched.”

“That is not a scratch.”

He shrugged.

Roman stood near the windows, phone in hand, listening to someone Ava could not hear. His reflection looked carved into the glass.

Finally he ended the call.

“Talk,” he said to Mason.

Mason poured whiskey with his uninjured hand and did not drink it.

“We lost the shooter by Lower Wacker. But he had help. The reservation, the booth, your arrival window—someone fed him all of it.”

Roman’s expression did not change.

Ava wrapped her arms around herself.

“What does that mean?”

Roman turned.

“My dinner tonight was arranged under an alias twenty-four minutes before I walked in,” he said. “Only a handful of people knew.”

His gaze held hers.

“And someone at that restaurant may have sold me.”

“No,” Ava said.

“You sound certain.”

“I sound horrified.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Yes.”

Roman walked toward her.

Ava backed up until the elevator doors touched her spine.

“You can’t keep me here,” she said.

“I can keep you alive.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is tonight.”

“I want to go home.”

“Your home is compromised.”

“My life is there.”

“Your death may be there too.”

Ava’s anger cracked through her terror.

“You don’t get to take over because I wrote a warning on a receipt.”

Roman stopped two feet from her.

“You stepped between me and a bullet.”

“I stepped between a bullet and a dining room.”

“Same bullet.”

“Not same reason.”

For the first time, his composure shifted.

Not much.

Enough.

Roman reached into his coat and withdrew the receipt.

Her warning was smeared now, ink blurred by rain and his fingers.

He placed it on the marble table beside them.

“This changed the night,” he said.

Ava stared at the ugly handwriting.

“No,” she said. “That ruined my life.”

Roman’s voice lowered.

“Then I will buy it back.”

She looked up sharply.

“It means by sunrise, every debt attached to your name will be gone.”

Her stomach dropped.

“You don’t know my debts.”

“I know enough.”

“You investigated me?”

“I investigate anyone who works within ten feet of my table.”

“You had no right.”

“No,” he said. “Only reason.”

Ava laughed once, bitterly.

“That’s what men like you call rights when they don’t need permission.”

Roman accepted the blow without blinking.

“You owe medical providers, a private lender, two collection agencies, and your landlord.”

Her throat tightened.

“My mother was sick.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know you worked double shifts for six months and still fell behind. I know your mother died in January. I know the hospital continued billing you through grief like grief was a luxury item.”

Ava’s eyes burned.

“Stop.”

Roman’s face remained controlled, but his voice softened by a degree.

“I also know you did not run.”

She hated him then.

Not because he was cruel.

Because part of her wanted to collapse from relief.

For months, debt had been a second skeleton inside her body. Every bill had felt like a bone. Every phone call had been another fracture. And now this dangerous man was saying he could make it vanish before breakfast.

“I won’t belong to you,” she said.

Roman’s eyes sharpened.

“I did not ask you to.”

“You said buy.”

“I said buy back. Not buy you.”

“There’s a difference in your world?”

“There had better be,” he said.

Silence opened between them.

Ava looked out at Chicago. The city seemed calm from this height. Clean. Electric. Untouched by the violence below.

But Ava had worked service long enough to know the upper floors always looked cleaner because someone else scrubbed the blood from the ground level.

Mason placed a folder on the table.

Roman opened it.

Inside were photographs.

Staff photographs.

The Silver Saint’s owner, Graham Stowe, with his politician smile.

Nora Bell, the hostess who cried whenever customers yelled but somehow remembered every regular’s anniversary.