My three-year-old daughter found an injured stranger hiding beneath a mansion while armed men searched the property above us—and instead of screaming, she pressed a cartoon bandage against his cheek and whispered, “Shh. Mommy will protect you.” I didn’t know the man was one of New York’s most feared crime bosses until we discovered a hidden recording downstairs proving the person trying to remove him from power was someone inside his own family.

The speed of the collapse was terrifying.

By noon the next day, the syndicate was eating itself alive. The leak of Paulie Vane’s pension theft spread through the crime families like wildfire. Three senior captains loyal to the old ways immediately withdrew their support from Bianca, locking down their territories in Queens and Staten Island.

Inside the grand estate, Bianca Russo was losing her mind.

Through the hacked security feeds on our laptop at the cold storage safehouse, we watched her pacing wildly across her father’s old oak-paneled study. Wine glasses lay shattered on the Persian rug. Her phone was ringing constantly, but she refused to answer it.

Standing before her desk was her chief of security, Marcus Cole—a cold, muscular mercenary who had carried out her dark work for half a decade.

"Find him!" Bianca screamed, her voice shrill and borderline unhinged. "He’s wounded! He’s playing mind games with the captains! How is he getting this data? All his private servers were destroyed!"

"We searched his penthouse, his club, his docks," Marcus reported stoically. "There’s no sign of him. But Boss... there’s something else."

"What?" she demanded.

"The housekeeper. Claire Bennett," Marcus said, pulling a file from his folder. "She hasn't returned to her quarters since the night of the attack. Her three-year-old daughter is missing too."

Bianca stopped pacing. Her eyes narrowed into tiny, venomous slits as a horrific realization dawned on her.

"Thomas Bennett's wife," Bianca whispered, a cruel, bitter smile spreading slowly across her red lips. "Thomas was an electronics expert. He spent two years in the sub-basement before we took care of him... My God. He built a secondary relay."

She slammed her fist onto the desk. "The wife has the files! She was working with Matteo!"

"Should I send a squad to her family in Ohio?" Marcus asked.

"No," Bianca snapped, her mind calculating fast. "Her parents are dead. She has no one left... except that child. Put a fifty-thousand-dollar street bounty on the white produce van they stole. I don't care if you have to burn down every industrial district in Queens. Bring me the girl and her mother. Once I have the child, Matteo will surrender himself within an hour."

In the safehouse office, I pulled off my headphones, my face pale, my body shaking with pure rage.

She was going after Lily.

Matteo walked over, placing a solid, reassuring hand on my shoulder. His wound was healing well, his color had returned, and the authority in his presence was absolute once again.

"She’s desperate, Claire," Matteo said softly. "When a chess player realizes they are three moves away from checkmate, they start knocking down the pieces on purpose. She’s making her final move."

"She thinks my daughter is a bargaining chip," I said, my voice dropping into a cold, terrifying calm that made even Matteo take notice. "She killed my husband. She tried to kill you. And now she’s threatening my child."