“I NEVER LOVED YOU,” THE MAFIA BOSS SAID—SHE LEFT THAT NIGHT. HE MEANT IT… UNTIL HE LOST HER

“I NEVER LOVED YOU,” THE MAFIA BOSS SAID—SHE LEFT THAT NIGHT.

HE MEANT IT… UNTIL HE LOST HER

Part 1

The first thing I heard was the rosary.

Click. Click. Click.

It was a soft sound, almost delicate, but in Dominic Russo’s study it was more frightening than a gunshot. Men raised their voices all the time in that house. They slammed fists on tables, barked orders, cursed each other in English and Italian, and then returned to dinner ten minutes later as if violence was just another spice in the air.

Dominic never needed volume.

When he was angry, he rolled the black onyx beads across his knuckles with the patience of a judge preparing a sentence. He did it now while three men stood in front of his desk with their heads lowered, and I stood just outside the half-open door holding a silver tray with two untouched espressos.

My name was Evelyn Bennett. I was twenty-four years old.

I restored damaged paper for a living before I married the most feared man in Chicago.

Or rather, before he married me.

Eleven months earlier, in a private chapel on the North Shore, Dominic had placed a ring on my finger in front of six witnesses, two priests, four armed guards, and my dying father’s last wish. There had been no tenderness in the vows. No promise of love. Just one cold sentence from Dominic Russo, spoken like law.

“You will be safe under my name.”

At the time, my father had already been coughing blood into handkerchiefs he thought I didn’t see. He had begged me to accept. He had said I did not understand how much danger we were in. He had said Dominic was the only man in this city powerful enough to keep me alive.

He had been right about one thing.

Dominic could keep people

alive.

Sometimes that was more terrifying than killing them.

Inside the study, a chair scraped across the floor. Someone gasped. I kept my face still. In that house, stillness was a survival skill.

Then the door opened wider and Dominic’s head of security, Mason Hale, stepped out first. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and severe in a way that made most men stop lying before he asked the second question. There was blood on his cuff.

Not his.

“Mrs. Russo,” he said.

I hated that title.

Not because it was false. Because it was true in all the wrong ways.

I stepped inside.

The room smelled like cedar, gun oil, and November rain. One man was on his knees on the Persian carpet, barely conscious, held between two guards. Dominic stood near the window in shirtsleeves, his tie gone, his dark hair slightly disordered, one hand braced on the desk over

an unfolded map of Chicago.

The blood across his knuckles caught my attention before anything else.

It was fresh.

His gaze followed mine.

“Leave it,” he said.

He might have meant the tray. He might have meant the room. With Dominic, verbs often covered too much territory.

I set the coffee down anyway.

The kneeling man made a wet, miserable sound. Every rational part of me said to walk away, go upstairs, close my bedroom door, and pretend the house was merely cold instead of criminal.

Instead, I crossed the room, picked up the folded linen napkin beside the tray, and reached for Dominic’s hand.

The air changed.

You could feel it.

The guards saw it first. Then the bleeding man on the carpet looked up through one swollen eye as if he had just watched someone place her fingers in a wolf’s mouth.

Dominic’s hand tightened by instinct. Not on me. Just enough to stop me if he wanted.