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

The plastic prescription bottle felt like a live coal in my palm.

"Elena Valenti," I read aloud, my voice barely carrying over the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock in the study. "Dated yesterday. Zolpidem and digoxin. Dr. Russo wrote this twenty-four hours ago."

Dominic didn't move.

For three full seconds, the most dangerous man in Chicago stood in the center of his study looking like a man who had just taken a bullet between the ribs.

"She died four years ago," Dominic whispered, his hand reaching out slowly to take the orange bottle from my fingers. "I identified her necklace when they pulled the wreckage of the cruiser off the rocks near Evanston."

"You identified her necklace, Dominic," Marcus said quietly from the sofa, pressing the ice pack against his collarbone. "You never saw the body. Russo told you the water and the propeller had done too much damage, and he handled the closed-casket release through his brother-in-law at the county morgue."

"Why?" Dominic's voice cracked—a raw, human sound that made even his bodyguard Daniel look down at the floor. "Elena was my wife. Why would she—"

"Because she didn't disappear on her own," Marcus said, leaning forward. "Four years ago, right before the boat went out, Elena went up to the third-floor cedar closet looking for old blankets for a church drive. She found the silver frame. She found the receipt showing your sister Sofia had been alive in St. Louis, and she found out that Tommy Romano's father was the one who actually set the Milwaukee fire twenty-two years ago—not the rival family Russo blamed it on."

My chest tightened as I held a sleepy Leo against my shoulder.

"Wait," I said, looking between Marcus and Dominic. "Dr. Russo worked for Dominic's father back then too?"

"Russo was thirty years old when your mother's house burned in Milwaukee," Marcus said heavily. "He was deep in debt to the Romano crew even then. He told them which house Sofia was hiding in. My father arrived an hour too late to stop the fire, so he took Sofia and little Emma to the bus station, took Dominic's fifty thousand dollars, and lied to everyone so Romano wouldn't hunt them to St. Louis."

Dominic stared at the prescription bottle, his knuckles white.

"When Elena figured out Russo had betrayed Sofia," Dominic said slowly, the horrifying truth assembling itself piece by piece, "she confronted him up on the third floor."

"And Russo sedated her," Marcus said. "He couldn't kill her without setting off the estate alarms or triggering an autopsy you would investigate yourself. So he staged the boating accident with Romano's help—and for the last four years, Romano and Russo have been keeping Elena alive on a locked yacht at the Monroe Harbor marina as their ultimate insurance policy against you."

A soft snore came from my shoulder.

Leo had fallen completely asleep, his cheek squished against the lapel of Dominic's coat, his little fingers still curled around his plastic dinosaur.

"Let me take him upstairs to the housekeeper's suite," Marcus's wife—no, wait, Martha was gone—Marco's sister Rosa, the night cook, offered gently from the doorway where she had been waiting with a warm blanket. "I'll lock the steel security shutter from the inside and sit right beside the bed."

I hesitated, every maternal instinct screaming at me not to let Leo out of my sight for a single second.

"Rosa has worked for my family since I was ten years old, Emma," Dominic said softly, his hand resting briefly on Leo's back as he looked into my eyes. "And four armed guards will be standing outside that door. Your ankle is bleeding through the gauze again, and where I'm going, you don't want Leo anywhere near it."

"I'm going with you to the marina," I said immediately after kissing Leo's forehead and laying him into Rosa's gentle arms.

"Emma—"

"My sister Clara is with Russo and Romano at that marina right now," I told him, my voice steady despite the sharp throb in my right heel. "She knows I have the First Midwest Bank key she dropped in Leo's coat. If they have your wife on that boat, they won't let you near the dock without the key she was trying to steal back."

Dominic looked at the brass bank key in my hand, then nodded once.

Twenty minutes later, our headlights cut through the dense lake fog rolling across Monroe Harbor.

The rain had stopped, leaving the wooden planks of Pier C slick and shining under the yellow sodium lights.

Slip Fourteen was at the very end of the pier, where a fifty-foot white motor yacht named The Santa Maria rocked gently against its rubber bumpers.

Standing under the canvas awning on the aft deck was Tommy Romano, a heavy silver revolver in his hand, and beside him stood Dr. Russo—holding my half-sister Clara by the collar of her wet denim jacket.

Clara's mascara was smeared down her cheeks, her blonde-streaked hair plastered to her neck.

"Emma!" Clara sobbed as Dominic, Daniel, and I stopped ten feet down the wooden dock. "Emma, please give him the key! They're going to throw me in the lake!"

"Throw you in the lake?" I called back, my heart breaking and hardening at the same time as I limped a step forward, leaning on Dominic's arm. "You took my five-year-old son out of his bed at five o'clock in the morning, Clara! You hit an old priest with a tire iron!"

"I didn't hit him, Russo was in the alley with me!" Clara cried, twisting in the doctor's grip. "I only took Leo to Marcus because Romano said he'd burn your apartment down if I didn't bring him the bank key from the third floor!"

"Shut up, both of you," Tommy Romano said, stepping to the edge of the yacht's rail and aiming the revolver directly at Dominic's chest. "Toss the bank key and the silver frame onto the deck, Dominic. Then walk backward off this pier, or you watch your wife go to the bottom of Lake Michigan for real this time."

The cabin door behind Romano slid open.

Another man stepped out, holding the arm of a thin woman in a gray wool cardigan, her dark hair streaked with silver, her eyes blinking weakly against the harbor lights.

"Dominic?" the woman whispered.

Dominic took half a step forward, a sound of pure agony tearing from his throat. "Elena."

Wait.

I looked past Elena at the open cabin door—and then down at the reflection of the cabin window in the wet fiberglass hull.

Inside the cabin, reflected clearly in the angled glass, someone else was sitting tied to the dinette bench—someone wearing a pink cardigan and tortoise-shell glasses I recognized from the staff Christmas party photo in Marcus's office.