Chapter 1 - The Night My Husband Finally Saw Me
My husband had spent six years believing I was the only person in Chicago he never needed to fear.
Then a gunfight tore through his hotel suite, his most trusted lieutenant stole a black briefcase, and Damien watched me take a weapon from a man twice my size like I had done it a hundred times before.
His first question was not whether I was hurt.
It was:
“Who are you?”
The Moretti meeting was supposed to last forty minutes.
I had attended only because Damien asked me to join him afterward for dinner downstairs.
Instead, I arrived just as the first shots shattered the glass doors.
By the time the room went quiet enough to think, Damien was leaning against an armchair with blood spreading across his white shirt from a wound near his shoulder.
Not fatal.
Not yet.
Three armed men stood between us and the exit.
And Luca Bellini—the man Damien had trusted since they were teenagers—was disappearing through a rear doorway carrying the black protective briefcase that had sat beside Damien’s chair all evening.
“Vanessa…”
Damien struggled for breath.
“What are you doing?”
I was barefoot.
My black silk gown was torn along one side.
One stiletto remained in my left hand because I had lost the other during the first rush toward cover.
The pistol in my right hand had belonged to one of Luca’s men.
An armed man near the doorway laughed.
“Look at the mafia boss’s sweet little wife.”
I looked past him.
Luca was almost gone.
That mattered more.
The man took one step toward me.
I moved before he finished deciding what to do.
One controlled strike.
His weapon hit the carpet several feet away.
I did not chase it.
I kept mine trained low and steady.
“You should have checked who I was before coming here.”
Behind me, Damien whispered my name again.
Different now.
Not husband to wife.
A man seeing a stranger wearing his wife’s face.
I moved toward him long enough to press the second weapon into his hand.
His fingers closed around it automatically.
“Who are you?”
Before I could answer, Luca looked back from the doorway.
His face had changed.
He had known me for years.
Apparently not well enough to predict tonight.
But better than Damien.
“She’s not a civilian…”
Then Luca disappeared into the hallway.
Damien stared at me.
I turned toward the remaining men.
“Stay alive.”
My eyes went to the door Luca had used.
May you like
“I’ll get back what he stole.”
And for the first time since marrying Damien Moretti, I stopped pretending I had never been trained to walk into a room like that.
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