Chapter 1 - THE WOMAN WHO BECAME HIS SHIELD
Three bullets tore through my body when I threw myself over the mafia boss’s six-year-old son.
Everyone expected Victor Romano to reward me with money—but when I woke up, he stood beside my hospital bed and said five words that changed my life forever:
“You’re going to be my wife.”
At the Romano estate, my job was simple: keep my head down, stay invisible, and use cold water on the marble so bloodstains would not set.
Men in expensive suits discussed smuggling routes and broken kneecaps while I cleaned around loaded guns and washed blood from their shirts.
Victor paid me twenty dollars an hour, five more than the agency rate because discretion had a price.
I needed every cent for my brother’s medical bills, so I never asked questions and perfected the art of becoming a ghost inside a house full of monsters.
Victor himself was thirty-four, newly widowed, and colder than winter.
A car bomb meant for him had killed his wife two years earlier, and since then, he had ruled Chicago’s Northern Syndicate with ruthless precision.
In eight months, he had never truly looked at me.
His pale eyes always moved past my gray uniform as though I were part of the furniture, and I preferred it that way.
The only warmth in the mansion came from his son, Leo.
He was six, quiet, and painfully lonely, trapped behind gates because every enemy his father had ever made could use him as a weapon.
One morning, I found him beneath the grand piano building towers from wooden blocks while his nanny argued with the chef.
I was not supposed to speak to him, so I rolled a butterscotch candy across the rug.
It stopped beside his sneaker, and when I pressed a finger to my lips, his small smile nearly broke my heart.
After that, it became our secret ritual.
I slipped candy beneath doors, and he left clumsy drawings on my cleaning cart because I was the only person in that suffocating mansion who saw a child instead of an heir.
The attack came on a rainy Thursday.
At 2:14 p.m., I was cleaning the sunroom while Leo arranged toy cars on the heated floor.
A black SUV smashed through the iron gates, tore across the lawn, and stopped directly outside the glass walls.
Its doors opened.
Men in tactical gear raised assault rifles.
The windows exploded inward under armor-piercing gunfire, showering the room with glass and plaster.
Guards shouted from the hallway as bullets ripped through furniture, shattered tile, and filled the air with smoke.
My body slammed against a planter, and every instinct told me to crawl behind the nearest marble pillar.
Then I saw Leo kneeling in the open, hands over his ears, too terrified to move.
There was no time to think.
I ran.
Ten feet felt like a mile as bullets tore through the floor around him.
I tackled Leo, wrapped my arms around his body, and twisted so my back faced the shattered windows.
The first bullet hit my shoulder like a sledgehammer.
The second tore through my ribs, driving a white-hot blade through my side.
I pressed Leo tighter against the floor while his tears soaked through my uniform.
The third bullet struck my lower back.
Pain swallowed everything, but I refused to release him.
When the gunfire finally stopped, heavy footsteps rushed across the broken glass.
Victor screamed Leo’s name with such raw panic that he sounded nothing like the man who terrified half the city.
He tried to roll me over, and I cried out.
“Don’t move me.”
Victor froze when he saw the three spreading stains across my back.
Then Leo whimpered beneath me, and the most feared man in Chicago began to shake.
He pulled his unharmed son free and held him for three silent seconds.
Then he handed Leo to a guard, pressed his suit jacket against my wound, and stared directly into my fading eyes for the first time.
“You don’t get to die,” he rasped. “Not after this.”
My vision blurred as his blood-covered hand closed around mine.
Then Victor leaned closer and whispered:
“From this moment on, nobody touches you. You belong to me.”
May you like
The world disappeared before I could answer.
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