Six months after I buried my husband, I found him standing ten feet from his own grave in the rain—alive, silent, and watching me cry over the lie he had let me believe. I had spent half a year apologizing to a dead man, and now Nicholas Moretti was looking at me like he had never stopped breathing at all.

“You expected me to just fall into your arms?” My voice was barely a hum, but every syllable carried the weight of six months of sleepless nights, hollow grief, and phantom phone calls that went straight to voicemail. “You let me sit through a closed-casket funeral. You let your men hand me a death certificate. You watched me mourn a ghost.”

Nicholas didn’t flinch. He took another slow step forward, closing the distance until I could feel the heat radiating from his body through his heavy black coat.

“It wasn't safe,” he said, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly register that used to make me feel invincible, and now only made me feel betrayed.

“Safe?” I laughed, a bitter, jagged sound. “For whom? For you? While I was tearing myself apart trying to figure out how to pay your estate taxes and wondering if I’d ever stop hearing your voice in an empty house?”

“For you,” he interrupted, his dark eyes flashing with a sudden, intense heat. “The bombing wasn't an accident, Elena. It was an inside job orchestrated by a coalition within the syndicate—men who wanted to cripple my operations by cutting off my head. If they knew you were alive, if they knew you meant anything to me, you would have been dead before the smoke cleared from that warehouse.”

I stared up at him, my mind racing to connect the pieces of a puzzle I never knew I was part of. “So your solution was to make me a widow? To leave me unprotected, grieving, and entirely in the dark?”

“My solution was to give you absolute deniability,” Nicholas said, his jaw tightening as a muscle ticked beneath his skin. “As far as the underworld is concerned, Nicholas Moretti is ashes. Anyone who comes looking for my bloodline hits a dead end. But the smoke is clearing now. I’ve spent the last six months dismantling the council piece by piece from the shadows. And now, I need you back.”

“Need me?” I stepped back, my voice rising. “I am not a chess piece, Nicholas. I am not an asset for you to pack away in a safehouse when things get complicated!”

Before he could answer, the sharp beam of a high-beam headlight cut through the heavy rain behind us.

A sleek black sedan had pulled up illegally onto the grass near the cemetery path, its engine idling with a low, predatory purr. The rear passenger door swung open automatically.

Two men in dark suits stepped out, their umbrellas shielding their faces from the downpour, though their hands hovered instinctively near their waistbands. One of them was Marcus, Nicholas’s head of security—a man I had fed coffee to in our kitchen countless times, a man who had looked me in the eye at the funeral and lied straight to my face.

Marcus looked at me with a grim, apologetic expression, then nodded to Nicholas.

“Boss, we’ve got company moving in from the eastern gate. The cleanup crew from the North Side docks is poking around earlier than expected.”

Nicholas didn't break eye contact with me. He reached out, his warm, calloused fingers wrapping firmly around my wrist before I could pull away. His grip was impossible to break without a fight.

“We’re leaving,” he said, not asking, but commanding.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I hissed, trying to yank my arm free.

“Elena, listen to me,” he murmured, stepping closer, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper that sent shivers down my spine. “If you stay here in Chicago acting like a grieving widow while my enemies realize I’m still breathing, they will use you to get to me. You are coming with me whether you scream the whole way or not.”

Before I could raise my voice or throw a punch, Marcus was there, gently but firmly placing a hand on my other elbow to guide me toward the idling vehicle.

I looked back one last time at the granite tombstone bearing my husband’s name.