My billionaire mafia husband asked if I could still love him if he never walked again, but before I could answer, a terrifying phone call changed everything...

The dial tone hummed like a flatline through the frozen silence of the library.

My hand shook so violently that the edge of the mahogany desk seemed to tremble in my peripheral vision. The air in the room had turned to lead, suffocating and sharp. Adrian didn’t move. He sat in his leather wheelchair, perfectly motionless, his carved jaw set in iron, his slate-gray eyes fixed on the blackened screen of the telephone between us.

"Adrian..." My voice was barely a splinter of sound. "She said... she said not to trust anyone in this house."

He didn't flinch. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his head. The raw vulnerability that had surfaced only moments before—when he had laid his wedding ring on the desk and asked if I could love an incomplete man—had vanished behind the terrifying mask of Don Adrian Vale. The ruthless kingpin of the city’s underworld was back, cold, calculating, and lethal.

"Who had the security detail at Saint Jude’s Memorial tonight?" Adrian’s voice was dangerously low, stripped of all humanity.

The heavy oak doors of the library pushed open before I could respond. Mateo, Adrian’s lifelong confidant and head of personal security, stepped into the room with his hand resting near his concealed holster. His expression was grim, pale beneath the library’s amber sconces.

"Boss," Mateo said quietly. "Sensors at the perimeter gate were bypassed three minutes ago. No breach alarms sounded. It was a digital ghosting from inside the local network."

My mother's voice replayed in my skull, screeching like rusted metal: *Don't trust anyone in that house.*

I stepped back, my spine colliding with the cold glass of the bay window. "My mother," I choked out, clutching my chest. "Victor has my mother. Adrian, he told me at the gala that he was going to dismantle your world piece by piece. I thought... God, I thought if I left you, if I packed my things and vanished, he wouldn't use me to destroy you!"

Adrian turned his chair, the wheels gliding silently across the Persian rug. He stopped just inches from me. He reached out, his calloused fingers gripping my chin, lifting my face with an unyielding yet strangely tender force.

"Look at me, Claire," he commanded.

I looked into his storm-colored eyes, drowned in panic.

"You think running would have saved her?" he whispered, his thumb brushing a tear from my cheek. "Victor didn’t take Evelyn because of a contract. He took her because he knows that you are the only breathing thing on this earth that can bring me to my knees."

My breath hitched. "Adrian..."

"Mateo," Adrian barked without breaking eye contact with me. "Lock down the estate. Cut all external telecommunications. Anyone who attempts to cross the gates without my direct iris scan is to be put in the ground. And bring Doctor Callahan up from the medical wing."

Mateo hesitated. "Callahan? Boss, Callahan was the one who signed off on Evelyn’s hospital transfer papers twenty minutes ago. We just pulled the digital log."

A suffocating chill settled over the room. Doctor Callahan—the family physician who had tended to Adrian’s crushed spine after the assassination attempt two years ago. The man who lived on this very estate.

"Callahan," Adrian said, his voice flat, devoid of surprise. He released my chin and picked up his discarded wedding ring from the desk, sliding it back onto his left ring finger with mechanical precision. "Bring him to the cellar. And Claire..."

He looked back at me, his eyes burning with an ancient, dark fire.