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.”

My old life saved me.

For eight months, I had carried sheets through this passage, hidden from guests, invisible to men who thought servants moved by magic. I knew where the floor dipped. I knew where the wall pipe stuck out. I knew the turn that led behind Leo’s room.

My lungs burned.

My back screamed.

Somewhere behind me, Victor shouted my name.

I kept crawling.

At the access panel behind Leo’s closet, I slammed my shoulder into the latch. Pain flashed white. The panel opened.

Leo’s room was full of smoke.

“Leo!” I choked.

A small cough answered from under the bed.

I dropped flat.

He was there, clutching his stuffed rabbit, eyes huge with terror.

“Mara?”

“I’m here.”

“The door was hot.”

“You did good staying low.”

“I couldn’t find Daddy.”

“He’s coming.”

I reached for him, but flames cracked near the doorway. The blast had blocked the hall exit. The service corridor was our only chance.

“Crawl to me,” I said.

He shook his head. Frozen.

I remembered the sunroom.

A child kneeling in the open, too terrified to move.

Not again.

I pressed one finger to my lips.

Our secret.

Then I rolled a butterscotch candy across the floor.

I had kept one in my cardigan pocket since leaving the estate. Stupid sentimental habit. Now it slid through ash and stopped beside his hand.

Leo stared at it.

Then at me.

His small face changed.

He crawled.

I grabbed him and pulled him into the passage just as part of the ceiling collapsed in his room.

The heat punched us forward.

Leo screamed.

I covered him with my body, again, because some instincts do not learn caution.

Hands grabbed my ankles.

For one wild second, I kicked.

Then Victor’s voice cut through.

“It’s me!”

He pulled us backward through the corridor. Dante and two guards dragged us into the linen closet, then out into the hallway beyond the smoke doors.

Victor took Leo first.

He pressed his son against his chest, shaking so violently that Leo began crying harder.

“I’m sorry,” Victor whispered over and over. “I’m sorry.”

Leo clung to him.

Then Victor looked at me.

I was on the floor, coughing, covered in soot.

His face broke in a way I had never seen.

Not fear.

Not guilt.

Love, stripped of pride.

He reached for me.

This time, I reached back.

The ballroom below had become a battlefield without bullets. Giorgio was restrained. His three loyalists were on their knees. The captains watched as Victor descended the stairs carrying Leo, with me leaning on Dante behind him.

Alessia ran to Leo and nearly collapsed when she touched him.

Adriana slapped Giorgio so hard the sound echoed.

“For Alessia,” she said.

Then slapped him again.

“For Leo.”

A third time.

“For Luca.”

Giorgio laughed with blood on his teeth.

“You think this ends me? I have copies. Names. Accounts. Men in courts. Men in uniforms. You burn me, I burn all of you.”

Victor handed Leo to Alessia.

Then walked to Giorgio.

For one terrible second, I thought he would kill him.

Instead, Victor took Giorgio’s phone and held it up.

“This device transmitted the trigger signal for an explosive placed near my son’s room,” Victor said clearly.

Dante’s men were recording.

Victor looked around at every captain.

“You all witnessed it.”

No one spoke.

Then Victor turned back to Giorgio.

“You wanted the old ways. Here they are. You will live long enough to answer publicly for every child sold, every death forged, every family destroyed.”

Giorgio spat at him.

Victor did not flinch.

“The ledger goes out now,” he said.

Dante pressed a key on his tablet.

Across Chicago, files began arriving.

Newsrooms. Federal inboxes. Private attorneys. Families who had spent decades wondering why records disappeared.

The Romano empire did not burn slowly.

It detonated.

But upstairs, wrapped in both his mother’s arms and mine, Leo was breathing.