Dominic sat frozen in his leather chair, his eyes glued to the black-and-white camera monitor. The silence of his study was deafening.

In the room three doors down the hall, Evelyn dropped her dust cloth. She didn't look startled; she looked focused, her hazel eyes locked onto Mateo’s.

"You can hear me," she whispered, stepping up to the side of the hospital bed. Her voice was barely audible through the camera's hidden microphone. "They said you were in a vegetative state, but you aren't, are you?"

Mateo blinked twice. Yes.

Dominic grabbed the edge of his desk, his knuckles turning chalk-white. For two years, the highest-paid neurosurgeons in the country had taken millions of dollars from the Moretti syndicate, shrugging their shoulders and calling his brother a lost cause. They had told Dominic to accept reality.

Evelyn didn't ask for a doctor. She pulled an oak chair up to the bedside, sat down, and pulled a small notebook and pen from her apron pocket.

"Okay," she said softly, leaning in close so Mateo wouldn't have to strain. "One blink for no. Two blinks for yes. Do you understand?"

Two blinks.

Evelyn smiled—a warm, radiant expression that lit up her full face and made Dominic’s chest tighten. "Good. Now, I used to work in a rehabilitation ward before... well, before my life changed. We had a system for non-verbal patients. It's an alphabet grid."

She held up her notebook, showing Mateo a handwritten chart divided into five rows and five columns of letters.

"I'll point to a row," Evelyn explained calmly. "You blink twice when I hit the right row. Then I'll point to the letter in that row, and you blink twice when I hit the right one. We spell it out. Slowly. Can we try?"

Two blinks.

Dominic stood up from his desk. His heart was thumping violently against his ribs—a feeling he hadn't experienced since the night of the ambush. He stepped out from behind his desk, crossed his study, and walked into the dimly lit hallway. He moved like a shadow, stopping outside Mateo's door, which was left cracked open an inch.

He watched through the narrow gap.

Evelyn was pointing her finger at the first row. "A, B, C, D, E..."

Mateo blinked twice at D.

"Okay. Row four. D... E... F... G... H... I..."

Two blinks at I.

For twenty minutes, Dominic stood in the cold draft of the hallway, watching a woman in a cheap gray dress painstakingly extract letters from a man the world had written off.

Finally, Evelyn looked down at her notebook, reading the completed sentence aloud in a low whisper:

"D-O-N-I-T-C... Dominic."

Mateo blinked twice.

Evelyn looked puzzled. "You want Dominic?"

Mateo blinked twice again. Then, with an agonizing effort that caused a single tear to roll down his sunken cheek, he blinked twice again.

"He... he is in danger," Evelyn translated, her voice rising in alarm as she read the next sequence of letters Mateo had guided her toward. "V... I... N... C... E... N... T."

Dominic’s eyes narrowed. Vincent.

Vincent Hale. His chief lieutenant. The man who had stood at his right hand for ten years. The man who had been in the room when Roland Blackwood ambushed their convoy.

Inside the room, Evelyn gasped. "Vincent is the traitor?"

Mateo blinked twice rapidly, his vital monitors spiking slightly.

Before Evelyn could say another word, the heavy wooden door was pushed open.

Evelyn jumped up from her chair, dropping her notebook to the floor. She spun around, her hands instinctively flying to her chest, expecting a guard or a nurse.

Instead, Dominic Moretti stood in the doorway.

He didn't look like a boss inspecting a servant. He looked like a storm given human form. His dark hair was slightly unkempt, his tailored suit jacket unbuttoned, and his dark eyes burned with a mixture of raw grief, lethal fury, and something entirely new as he looked at the chubby maid standing beside his brother's bed.

Evelyn swallowed hard, trying to step between Dominic and Mateo defensively. "Mr. Moretti... I can explain—"

Dominic ignored her. He walked past her, his heavy footsteps echoing on the hardwood floor, and fell to his knees beside Mateo's bed.

The most feared mob boss in Chicago—a man who had never bowed to politicians, rivals, or the law—knelt on the floor of his own house, taking his brother's limp, motionless hand in both of his.

"Mateo," Dominic choked out, his voice cracking with an emotion he had buried for two agonizing years. "You're in there. God help me, you're in there."

Mateo blinked twice.