PART 1 Gabriel Romano was being fitted for his wedding suit when he decided his missing assistant had probably betrayed him.
Gabriel Romano was being fitted for his wedding suit when he decided his missing assistant had probably betrayed him.
That should have made him angry.
Instead, it made him uneasy.
Because Norah Quinn did not disappear.
She anticipated problems before they arrived.
She remembered every account, every payoff, every lie told in polished boardrooms and dirty back rooms.
And for four years, she had never once missed his call.
Then she vanished for two full days.
With the offshore keys.
With the ledger.
With secrets powerful enough to start a war.
His fiancée barely looked up from her phone when he said Norah was missing.
“Fire her,” Sloan said.
“Replace her.”
“We have a wedding in forty-eight hours.”
That was the first thing that bothered him.
Not her words.
How quickly she said them.
No concern.
No surprise.
No question about the ledger.
No fear about what Norah knew.
Just flowers, photographers, guest lists, and the exact shade of white she wanted on the tables.
Gabriel left the fitting before the tailor finished pinning the cuffs.
Rain was already hitting the city by the time his SUV turned toward Southside.
Norah’s address sat on his screen like an insult.
He paid her enough to live in a glass tower with cameras and a doorman.
Instead, she was living in a crumbling building at the edge of Kensington territory.
That was the second thing that bothered him.
The woman who managed half his empire had been living somewhere even his enemies avoided after dark.
By the time he reached the fourth floor, his hand was already on his gun.
The apartment door was broken.
The room inside was almost empty.
No couch.
No photos.
No television.
Just a folding table, encrypted hard drives, and folders full of his syndicate’s business.
No life.
Just work.
Then he saw the blood.
Not drops.
Dragged streaks across the floor.
The kind left by someone trying very hard not to die before they reached a locked room.
He pushed open the bathroom door and stopped breathing.
Norah was on the floor between the tub and the toilet, trying to stitch her own leg shut.
Her shirt was soaked through.
One side of her face was purple and yellow.
A knife wound cut deep into her thigh.
And even then, with fever in her eyes and blood on her hands, she still looked at him like he was the inconvenience.
“You’re tracking mud on the floor, boss,” she whispered.
Men had bled in front of Gabriel before.
He had caused some of it.
He had watched others without blinking.
But this hit differently.
Because Norah was never supposed to be the one on the ground.
He dropped to his knees.
Pressed the towel back against the wound.
Demanded a name.
She laughed once, and even that sounded painful.
“Nobody shot me,” she said.
“It was a knife.”
“And you’re asking the wrong question.”
That was when the room changed.
Not because she was hurt.
Because she wasn’t talking like a woman hiding betrayal.
She was talking like a woman who had found something worse.
Gabriel asked who did this.
Norah looked at him through the fever, then toward the hard drives on the table.
“You really still think I vanished to sell you out?” she asked.
He said nothing.
She swallowed, winced, and gave him the kind of tired smile that only made him more uneasy.
“The merger isn’t a marriage, Gabriel.”
“It’s a takeover.”
His hand tightened around the blood-soaked towel.
For a second, he thought the fever was making her delirious.
Then she said the one thing he did not expect.
The one thing that made every detail from the last month turn dark all at once.
May you like
“Your fiancée isn’t trying to marry you,” Norah whispered.
“She’s trying to bury you.”
