I was barefoot, shaking, and hiding beneath a stranger's desk while my abusive husband searched the hallway, threatening to drag me home. I had no idea the man protecting me was Alexander Moretti, Chicago's most feared mafia boss. But when my husband stormed into his office and demanded his wife back, Alexander looked him straight in the eyes and said three words that changed my life: “She decides.”

The transition from the restaurant’s private annex to Alexander’s residential stronghold was an impressionistic blur of pressurized elevators, subterranean concrete garages, and the low, muffled thrum of a twelve-cylinder armored Maybach slicing through the midnight sleet along Lake Shore Drive.

I drifted in and out of consciousness beneath the heavy wool blanket Alexander had wrapped around my shoulders.

Every time the vehicle hit a seam in the asphalt, my ribs flared with dull heat, but the sharp, blinding agony in my arm had receded into a cool, chemical numbness—Dr. Evans’s local block had taken hold before they even carried me down the back service ramp.

When my eyes opened fully, I was lying in an emperor-sized bed surrounded by four towering posts of hand-carved mahogany.

The room was vast, fifty feet long, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the black, churning expanse of Lake Michigan. Outside, a brutal November gale was throwing sheets of gray ice against the double-paned glass, but inside, the air was warm, smelling of eucalyptus, bees-wax polish, and the dry, comforting heat of an open limestone fireplace crackling in the corner.

The sheets beneath my bare skin were Egyptian cotton, crisp and impossibly soft.

I looked down at myself.

My torn navy cocktail dress was gone. Someone had dressed me in an oversized, ivory cashmere sweater that fell nearly to my knees, clean and warm, smelling faintly of the same cedarwood that clung to Alexander’s coats. My right forearm was encased in a lightweight, rigid fiberglass splint that ended just below the knuckles, bound with clean, sterile white gauze.

Beside the bed sat a small side table holding a glass carafe of ice water, two porcelain cups, and a blister pack of high-grade analgesics.

And sitting in the high-backed wing chair beside the hearth, a pair of wireless reading glasses perched on his nose, was Alexander Moretti.

He had stripped off his suit jacket and tie. He wore a charcoal cashmere vest over a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, displaying the thick, corded muscle and the dark, intricate ink of a family crest tattooed on his inner wrist. A stack of thick, blue-bound corporate dossiers sat on his lap, but he wasn't reading them.

He was watching me.

The moment my eyes focused on his, he closed the folder and set it on the slate hearth.

"You've been asleep for fourteen hours," Alexander said, his voice quiet, gravelly from disuse. "It's two o'clock on Sunday afternoon."

I tried to sit up.

A sharp twinge caught my lower left rib, and an involuntary hiss escaped my lips.

Before I could move another inch, Alexander was out of the chair. He crossed the twenty feet of Persian rug with silent, predatory grace, stopping beside the mattress. He didn't hover, and he didn't touch me without warning; he simply extended his hand, bracing the pile of down pillows behind my back, adjusting them until my spine was supported at a comfortable forty-five-degree angle.

"Easy," he murmured. "Dr. Evans had to reduce the fracture. The bone had shifted three millimeters out of alignment. If you twist your torso, you'll torque the pins."

"My phone," I whispered, my voice sounding like sandpaper against iron.

"At the bottom of the Chicago River," Alexander said smoothly, pouring cold water from the carafe into a ceramic tumbler and offering it to my left hand. "Along with your husband's Aston Martin."

I froze, the glass halfway to my mouth. "You... you sank his car?"

"Dante was thorough," Alexander replied, his face completely devoid of expression. "Derek was remarkably cooperative once he realized the water in the slip was thirty-eight degrees. He surrendered his devices, his corporate authentication keys, and his master passwords before the tow truck even disconnected the cables."

I took a slow, trembling sip of the water. It was cold, clean, and cleared the bitter residue of the anesthetic from my tongue.

"Where is he?" I asked, terrified of the answer.

"At Northwestern Memorial Hospital," Alexander said, returning to the wing chair and leaning back, his long legs crossed at the ankle. "In the orthopedic surgery wing. Under armed guard. He has two shattered patellas, a fractured fibula, and a temporary tracheostomy to assist his breathing while his crushed larynx recovers."

My throat clicked as I swallowed.

For three years, Derek had been an immovable monolith in my life. He was the man whose footsteps on the hardwood could make my stomach drop into my shoes; the man who could dismantle my sanity with a single raised eyebrow at a dinner party; the man who had convinced my parents, my friends, and my employers that I was an unstable, fragile bird who would die in the gutter without his financial guidance.

And this stranger had broken him into pieces in the span of ninety seconds.

"He won't stop," I whispered, the old, conditioned panic clawing at my throat. "You don't understand how he works, Mr. Moretti. Derek doesn't fight with his hands when he loses. He uses paper. He has three law firms on retainer. He has my signature on seven different corporate indemnification waivers that he made me sign during our first year. He’ll go to the media. He’ll tell them you kidnapped me."

Alexander looked at me for a long, unblinking moment.

A faint, wintry smile touched the corner of his lips—a smile that held zero warmth, but carried an absolute, terrifying certainty.

"Let him file his papers, Emily," Alexander said softly.

He reached down to the slate hearth, picked up the thick, blue-bound dossier he had been reading, and laid it across the down comforter over my knees.