Three bullets tore into my body because I threw myself between a gunman and the six-year-old heir to New York’s most feared billionaire mafia family.

The underground medical suite beneath Blackthorne House was colder than a tomb, lit by the harsh, sterile glare of overhead surgical halogens.

The rhythmic, frantic chime of a cardiac telemetry monitor echoed off the stainless-steel walls: 145... 150... 160.

Dr. Ronald Hayes, Dominic’s personal trauma surgeon who had patched gunshot wounds for three decades without filing a single police report, stood over the operating table with blood-stained latex gloves. Two surgical nurses worked around him with mechanical, furious speed, cutting away the shredded remnants of my uniform.

"Two through-and-through penetrating trauma wounds to the left lateral thorax," Dr. Hayes shouted over the hiss of the rapid infuser pump. "Third round is retained beneath the subscapular fossa! Hemothorax is building rapidly on the left! Systolic pressure is seventy over forty and falling!"

"Fix her, Ronald," Dominic said.

He stood at the foot of the table, refusing to scrub out, refusing to leave the room. He had stripped off his tuxedo jacket, wearing only a blood-soaked white dress shirt, his hands resting heavily on the steel guardrail.

"Dominic, you need to step outside," Dr. Hayes warned, his scalpel poised over my chest. "She’s in hypovolemic shock. If that retained slug tore the subclavian artery, she will bleed out on this table before I can place the cross-clamp."

"If she dies on this table, Ronald," Dominic whispered, his voice dropping into a register of quiet, terrifying finality that made the surgical nurses freeze, "you won't need to worry about your medical license. Because you won't leave this room."

I lay trapped in the twilight between agonizing consciousness and black oblivion.

Through the oxygen mask, I could feel the cold metal of the thoracostomy tube sliding between my ribs, followed by a rush of intense, burning pressure as the trapped blood was evacuated. The monitor alarms slowed slightly, the green sine waves smoothing out.

Dr. Hayes used a curved pair of titanium forceps, reaching deep into the muscle tissue beneath my shoulder blade.

With a sickening, metallic clink, a flattened, hollow-point lead slug dropped into a stainless-steel kidney dish.

"Retained slug retrieved," Hayes breathed, wiping sweat from his forehead with his forearm. "The artery is intact. Hemostasis achieved in the pleural space. Hang two more units of uncrossed O-negative and start the continuous fentanyl infusion."

Dominic stepped closer, his large, scarred hand gently reaching out to brush a damp lock of hair from my forehead.

His eyes moved down to the exposed skin of my right collarbone where my shirt had been cut away.

There, stamped into the pale skin above my third rib, was a faint, distinct raised scar—a brand shaped like a soaring falcon clutching an anchor. The historical crest of the Vance Shipping Dynasty.

Dominic stared at the mark. His thumb traced the edge of the scar with infinite, lingering gentleness.

"Corinne Vance," Dominic murmured softly, his amber eyes darkening with dangerous, possessive realization. "The lost daughter of Savannah. You hid in my kitchen for three months while half the syndicates in the country were digging up graves looking for you."