Chapter 1
"Seven bullets were still inside my body when Dominic Rossi put a gold ring on my swollen finger and married me beside an intensive-care bed. I was unconscious, breathing through a tube, and had no idea the most feared crime boss in New York had leaned close and whispered, “Now anybody who comes for you comes through me.”
What I learned later was even more terrifying.
Dominic already knew something about me before the first bullet was fired—something he believed could destroy both of us if I ever discovered the truth.
Three hours before the shooting, I had been carrying champagne through the glittering ballroom of the Aster Crown Hotel. Two hundred guests in diamonds and tuxedos drank beneath crystal chandeliers while judges, bankers, lobbyists, and men with dangerous reputations laughed as though nothing ugly could ever reach them.
None of that world belonged to me.
At twenty-six, I was behind on rent and working someone else’s catering shift because my mother, Ellen, was in a Cleveland treatment center fighting a heart condition that had already swallowed everything I had saved. I worked mornings at a Queens diner, private events at night, and slept whenever life accidentally gave me five hours.
That evening was supposed to earn me four hundred dollars plus tips.
“Easy on the glasses.”
The quiet voice startled me so badly my tray tilted. A broad-shouldered man in a midnight tuxedo steadied one champagne flute with two fingers and studied me with dark, unreadable eyes.
“You’re new,” he said.
“Is that a crime?”
His eyebrow lifted, and I immediately wished my exhaustion had come with a filter.
An elegant silver-haired woman beside him laughed. “Dominic, stop frightening the staff.”
“I’m standing here, Mother.”
“You frighten people standing still.”
Her name was Isabella Rossi, and unlike her son, she smiled warmly. When she noticed how exhausted I looked, she touched my wrist and told me to drink some water before I collapsed.
“Nobody should have to faint for rich people,” she said.
Maybe she gave me ten seconds of kindness.
Thirty minutes later, those ten seconds saved her life.
I was walking near the service corridor when I noticed another catering employee moving against the flow of waiters. His hand disappeared beneath his jacket, and his eyes weren’t searching for tables.
They were fixed on Isabella.
Then I saw the gun.
“Get down!”
My tray hit the marble and exploded into crystal.
Dominic reached beneath his jacket, but I was closer.
I threw myself into Isabella and drove her toward the floor as the first gunshot tore through the ballroom. After that, my memories became fragments—screaming guests, trembling chandeliers, champagne spilling across marble, and Isabella trapped beneath me.
Then came the pain.
The first bullet hit like a hammer between my ribs.
The second stole my breath.
By the third, all I could hear was ringing.
More bullets tore through me while my body remained over Isabella’s. Somewhere beyond the pain, Dominic shouted, another gun fired, and suddenly the shooting stopped.
When Dominic rolled me onto my back, my uniform was soaked red.
“The lady…” I managed.
“My mother?”
I found Isabella behind him, alive.
“Good.”
Then everything disappeared.
What happened afterward was told to me much later.
Dominic refused to wait three minutes for an ambulance and ordered his men to drive me to St. Catherine Medical Center, where the private wing could be locked down. While surgeons fought to keep me alive, Dominic stood outside in his bloodstained tuxedo as his second-in-command, Enzo, brought him the news.
The shooter was connected to Victor Costa.
And someone had already leaked that I survived.
“He’ll finish her,” Dominic said.
Isabella rose from her chair, rosary clenched in her hand. “Then protect her.”
“I am.”
“For how long?”
May you like
Dominic went completely silent.
Because protecting me for one night would never be enough—and the answer forming in his mind was something no one in that hospital was prepared to hear.
