THE MAFIA BOSS NOTICED I WOULDN’T PUT MY RIGHT HEEL ON THE FLOOR—THEN HIS HOUSE MANAGER STOPPED EATING

Dr. Russo had just tied off the fourth stitch in my ankle when the bedroom door opened without a knock.

Dominic Valenti walked in.

He had taken off his suit jacket, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to his forearms, his dark eyes fixed entirely on me.

With a quiet tilt of his head, he signaled Dr. Russo and Daniel to leave.

The door clicked shut behind them.

I pulled my skirt down over my bandaged ankle, my heart hammering against my ribs.

"I can still finish the dishwasher load in the pantry, Mr. Valenti," I said, trying to stand. "My hands work fine."

"Sit down, Emma."

His voice wasn't loud, but it carried the weight of a man who owned half of Chicago's shipping lanes.

I sat back down on the edge of the mattress.

Dominic reached into his trouser pocket.

When his hand came out, my breath caught in my throat.

Resting across his palm was a tiny blue plastic dinosaur with a chewed-off tail.

Leo's favorite toy.

"The garage cameras are remarkably clear," Dominic said softly, turning the little plastic stegosaurus over in his fingers. "At 10:13 this morning, Marcus Hale pulled his black sedan into bay four. You got out of the back seat. You were already limping."

I stared at the carpet, my fingers digging into the quilt.

"And before you closed the door," Dominic continued, stepping closer, "you leaned back inside and kissed a little boy in a yellow raincoat on the forehead. Then Marcus drove away with him."

"Please," I whispered, the word tearing out of my chest. "If Marcus knows you saw—"

"Marcus isn't going anywhere. My men blocked his car in the driveway ten minutes ago, and he's currently waiting in my study with two guards outside."

Dominic crouched in front of me so I had to look into his face.

For eleven months, I had seen him as a cold, untouchable shadow at the head of a twenty-foot table.

Up close, I saw the silver threading his dark temples and the fierce, quiet intensity in his eyes.

"Who is the boy, Emma?"

"My son," I said, a tear finally spilling over my lashes. "His name is Leo. He's five."

"Why did Marcus Hale have your five-year-old son in his car?"

"Because if I didn't come in today to work the dinner party, Marcus said he wouldn't give him back."

A muscle feathered in Dominic's jaw.

The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.

"Start from six o'clock this morning," Dominic said. "And don't leave out a single second."

"My sister Clara watches Leo when I work," I said, my voice trembling. "Wait—she's my half-sister. Two nights ago, she didn't come home. Yesterday morning, Marcus showed up at my apartment in Pilsen."

I swallowed hard, remembering the terror of opening my front door to see Dominic's house manager standing in my hallway.

"Marcus said Clara had taken something from this house," I told him. "Wait—Clara doesn't even work here, Mr. Valenti, I swear it. I don't know how she even knew Marcus. But he said she owed a debt, and until I did exactly what he told me to do tonight, his cousin would keep Leo at a house near Midway Airport."

"And your ankle?" Dominic asked, his gaze dropping to the white gauze.

"I tried to pull Leo out of the back seat of Marcus's car this morning outside my apartment," I said, wiping my cheek with the back of my hand. "Marcus slammed the car door on my foot to make me let go. The bottom metal edge sliced right through my sneaker."

Dominic didn't curse.

He didn't slam his fist into the wall.

Instead, he stood up with a terrifying stillness and pulled out his phone.

"What did Marcus ask you to do tonight during the dinner?" he asked before dialing.

"That's the part that makes no sense," I whispered. "He didn't ask me to steal money or listen to your waterfront deal. He told me that while you were all in the dining room, I had to go into the third-floor hallway, open the cedar linen closet, and switch the silver-framed photograph on the top shelf with a duplicate he had in his coat pocket."

Dominic's thumb froze over his phone screen.

Slowly, he lifted his eyes to mine.

For the first time since I had worked at the estate, I saw genuine shock crack across Dominic Valenti's face.

"The cedar closet on the third floor?" he repeated quietly.

"Yes, sir."

"Nobody goes onto the third floor. Not even Marcus."

"He had a brass key," I said, reaching into my apron pocket. My fingers closed around the cold metal he'd forced into my palm before dinner. I held it out. "I couldn't do it. My foot hurt too much to climb the back stairs during the soup course. That's why Marcus was staring at me in the dining room. He knew I hadn't gone up there yet."

Dominic took the brass key.

He didn't call his security chief.

Instead, he looked at my bandaged foot, then back at my face.

"Stay in this room," he said. "Lock the door behind me."

"No," I said, forcing myself up despite the sharp pull of the stitches. "My son is out there. And if that photograph has something to do with why Marcus took him, I'm coming with you."

Dominic hesitated for a fraction of a second, measuring my stubbornness against the pain in my face, before he offered me his arm.

I took it, leaning on his solid warmth as we took the private elevator to the closed third floor.

The hallway smelled of dried lavender and old timber.

Dominic unlocked the cedar closet and reached up to the top shelf, pulling down a heavy silver frame.

I expected to see business partners, or maybe his late wife, Elena, who had died four years ago in a boating accident on Lake Michigan.

Instead, it was a faded photo from thirty years ago showing two young men standing in front of an old bakery—a young Dominic, and beside him, a smiling teenager holding a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.

Pinned to the back of the frame with a tarnished paperclip was a child's crayon drawing on folded lined paper.

Dominic turned the frame over.

His breath stopped.

My knees went weak as I looked at the corner of the crayon drawing.

In bright red wax, written in spiky, five-year-old letters I knew better than my own heartbeat, was a name: LEO.

And beneath the drawing, tucked inside the velvet backing, was a silver locket on a broken chain—the exact locket my mother had worn every day until she died when I was ten.