I took three bullets saving the mafia boss’s six-year-old son—and when I woke up, his “reward” was five terrifying words: “You’re going to be my wife.”

White ceiling. White walls. White sheets tucked so tightly around my body that I could not tell where the hospital bed ended and I began. Machines whispered beside me, steady and cold. Every breath felt like someone had wrapped wire around my ribs and pulled.

For several seconds, I remembered nothing.

Then the sunroom returned in flashes.

Rain on glass.

Leo’s toy cars scattered across the heated floor.

Men in black tactical gear.

The first bullet.

The second.

The third.

My eyes snapped open wider, and pain shot down my spine so sharply that I gasped.

A chair scraped beside the bed.

Victor Romano stood up.

He was still wearing the same black shirt from the attack, though the cuffs had been rolled to his elbows. There was dried blood beneath one fingernail. Mine, probably. His face looked carved from stone, but his eyes were different now. They were not the pale, empty eyes that used to pass over me in the hallway. They were awake. Fixed. Burning.

“You’re alive,” he said.

His voice was rough enough to sound broken.

I tried to speak, but my throat felt like sandpaper. Victor reached for a glass of water and held the straw to my lips himself. The gesture was so impossible that I wondered if I was still unconscious.

“Leo?” I whispered.

Victor’s jaw tightened.

“Unharmed.”

Only then did my eyes burn.

The machine beside me quickened. Victor noticed immediately.

“He’s outside,” he said. “The doctors wouldn’t let him in until you woke up.”

I swallowed. “He saw?”

“He saw enough.”

Victor looked toward the door. Behind the glass panel, a small shape moved. Leo stood there in dinosaur pajamas, one hand pressed against the glass, his face pale and terrified.

I tried to lift my hand. My body refused.

Victor turned, opened the door, and crouched before his son. He spoke too quietly for me to hear. Leo nodded once, then slipped into the room.

He did not run. He walked carefully, as if the floor might disappear beneath him.

When he reached my bed, his lower lip trembled.

“I didn’t move,” he whispered.

My heart cracked.

“You were scared,” I said.

“I should’ve moved.”

“You survived,” I told him. “That’s what matters.”

His tiny hand found the edge of my blanket. “You got hurt because of me.”

“No,” I said, forcing each word through the pain. “I got hurt because bad men made a choice. You didn’t.”

Leo’s eyes filled with tears.

Victor turned away, but not before I saw his face change.

For eight months, I had scrubbed blood from his marble floors. I had watched men beg him for mercy. I had heard him give orders that made grown men lower their eyes. Victor Romano did not flinch. Victor Romano did not soften.

But looking at his son now, he looked like a man standing over a grave.

Leo leaned closer. “Are you still my friend?”

I smiled, and even that hurt.

“Always.”

He climbed onto the chair beside my bed and carefully placed something on my blanket. A folded piece of paper.

A drawing.

There were three figures in crayon. One small boy. One tall man in black. One woman in gray with giant red wings around both of them.

Under it, in uneven letters, Leo had written: MY ANGEL.

I could not stop the tears then.

Victor looked at the drawing for a long time.

Then he turned to me.

“The men who attacked my home were not street soldiers,” he said. “They had codes, entry timing, guard rotations, blind spots. Someone inside my estate gave them everything.”

The air changed.

I thought of the nanny who ignored Leo. The guards who smoked near the kitchen entrance. The men in suits who smiled while talking about betrayal. The estate was full of monsters, yes—but one of them had opened the gate.

Victor stepped closer to my bed.

“You saved my son,” he said. “That makes you a target.”

“I’m a maid,” I whispered. “No one cares about me.”

His eyes darkened.

“I care.”

The words landed harder than they should have.

I looked away. “You can give me protection until I’m discharged. Then I’ll disappear.”

“No.”

I stared at him.

Victor’s face hardened again, as if tenderness embarrassed him.

“You will not disappear. You will not go back to your apartment. You will not return to that agency. You will not be left alone for my enemies to use against me.”

My pulse climbed. “You don’t get to decide my life.”

“I do when your life became connected to mine.”

“Because I saved your son?”

“Because you became family the moment you bled over him.”

The word family made something twist inside me.

I had one family member left. My younger brother, Caleb, lying in a long-term care facility across town, his treatments costing more than I made in a month. I had survived eight months at the Romano estate because Caleb needed me alive, working, silent.

“I need to see my brother,” I said.

Victor did not blink.

“I know.”

Cold spread through me.

Of course he knew.

A man like Victor Romano did not allow strangers into his home without taking apart their lives first.

“He’s been moved,” Victor said.

My blood turned to ice. “What?”

“To a private wing. Better doctors. Better security. Paid in full.”

I tried to sit up, and pain tore through my back.

“Don’t touch him,” I snapped.

Victor’s eyes flashed.