Every beautiful woman in Chicago had tried to capture the attention of the city's most feared mafia boss, and every one of them had failed. Then I accidentally sang an old lullaby while cleaning his penthouse, and the most dangerous man I had ever met froze like he had seen a ghost.

By midnight, my world had been completely upended.

Vincenzo didn't let me go back to my cramped, mold-infested apartment in Pilsen. Instead, he dispatched Marco and four armed guards to pack up Mateo’s belongings, pay off our landlord, and bring my terrified seventeen-year-old brother straight to the penthouse in an armored SUV.

When Mateo arrived, his cheeks were flushed, his breath rattling in his lungs, his eyes wide as saucepans as he took in the marble floors, forty-foot ceilings, and armed guards patrolling the private terrace.

"Lucia?" Mateo wheezed, clutching his shoulder bag to his chest. "What's going on? Who are these guys? Did you get mixed up with something bad?"

"No, Matty, no," I said quickly, rushing forward to hug him tight, burying my face in his shoulder, smelling the familiar scent of laundry soap and stale rain on his jacket. "It's okay. We're safe."

Vincenzo stepped out from the hallway, flanked by a private physician in a crisp white lab coat.

"Mateo," Vincenzo said, his voice smooth and warm. "I am Vincenzo. I'm your cousin."

Mateo blinked, looking between Vincenzo’s tailored suit and my worn sneakers. "Cousin? Lucia, we don't have rich cousins. We have Uncle Sal who lives in a trailer in New Jersey."

"It's a long story, kid," Marco grunted from near the door, setting down Mateo's worn duffel bags.

Dr. Vance, the private physician, spent the next hour examining Mateo in one of the luxury guest suites. He prescribed state-of-the-art oxygen therapy, brought out specialized inhalers from Switzerland that weren't even available in American pharmacies yet, and assured me that Mateo's lungs would show significant improvement within weeks.

Everything I had spent three years breaking my back for—slaving over dirty floors, skipping meals, crying myself to sleep in cold rooms—was solved by Vincenzo Russo with a single phone call.

Yet, as the night grew quiet and Mateo fell into a deep, peaceful sleep on silk sheets in his new room, I couldn't sleep.

I walked out into the vast, silent living room.

The broken window had already been temporarily sealed with heavy steel-framed reinforced glass by a night crew. The blood on the floor had been meticulously scrubbed away by professional cleaners until not a single stain remained.

Vincenzo was sitting on the terrace outside, despite the cold autumn wind blowing off Lake Michigan. He wore an unbuttoned black coat, holding a burning cigarette between his fingers, watching the distant headlights crawling down Lake Shore Drive.

I pushed the glass sliding door open quietly. The brisk wind hit my face, fluttering the silk robe Vincenzo's housekeeper had left in my room.

"You should be sleeping, Lucia," Vincenzo said without turning around.

"So should you," I replied, walking to the edge of the stone railing, leaning against the cold granite, looking down at the shimmering grid of Chicago below.

"A man in my position doesn't sleep much," he murmured, taking a drag from his cigarette, the tip glowing bright orange in the dark. "Sleep is when your enemies do their best work."

I looked at his profile—the sharp jaw, the quiet strength, the subtle lines of exhaustion around his dark eyes.

"Why didn't you just tell me six months ago?" I asked gently. "Why let me clean your toilets and wipe your windows while you watched me?"

Vincenzo flicked his ash over the railing into the abyss below.

"Because my world is toxic, Lucia," he said, turning his head to look at me. "Everything I touch bleeds. If my rivals knew you were my blood, you would have become a target on day one. I wanted to keep you close enough to protect you, but far enough away to keep your name clean."

"And now?" I asked, my heart fluttering nervously. "Now Donato Moretti knows about me. He saw me on your security feed."

Vincenzo’s face darkened, the cold predator returning behind his eyes.

"Donato Moretti is no longer a threat," Vincenzo said flatly. "He signed over his shipping docks at two o'clock this morning. By dawn, he will be on a private plane to Sicily, where he will spend the rest of his miserable life under guard in a mountain cottage."

He stepped closer to me, blocking the freezing wind with his broad body.

"You are safe here, Lucia," he whispered, reaching out to gently touch my shoulder. "You and Mateo will never want for anything again. You can go back to college. You can study music, or art, or whatever your heart desires. I will fund everything."

It sounded like a fairytale. It sounded like everything I had ever prayed for.

So why did my stomach twist into a nervous knot?

Because as I looked up into Vincenzo's dark, magnetic eyes, I realized something terrifying.

He didn't just see his dead mother when he looked at me. He saw something else—something dangerous, intense, and possessive.