"How long?" Adrian’s voice was a low rasp, cutting through the sterile hum of the private hospital wing.

Inside the warehouse office, Sarah Bennett sat tied to a wooden chair, her throat raw from screaming, her eyes swollen with tears.

The door creaked open, and heavy footsteps approached. She flinched, expecting Dante’s men—or worse, Dante himself. But instead, a tall, imposing figure stepped into the dim amber light of the single overhead bulb.

Sarah stopped breathing.

The gray coat. The worn brown shoes. The broad shoulders and the sharp, hawklike jawline that she had spent three years trying to forget.

"Adrian?" she breathed, the name barely escaping her cracked lips.

Adrian stopped dead in his tracks. The gun in his hand felt suddenly heavy, like a lead weight. He looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time in nearly four years. The exhaustion in her eyes, the dark bruise blooming across her cheek where Dante had struck her, the way her shoulders trembled beneath her thin sweater.

It was his fault. All of it.

"Sarah," he choked out, his voice cracking. He dropped his weapon onto the desk, crossed the room in two strides, and fell to his knees beside her chair.

"Don't touch me!" Sarah cried out, pulling away as far as the ropes would allow, though the fierce anger in her voice was drowned out by overwhelming heartbreak. "You brought this! You brought this into our lives! If you had just stayed away—if you had never come into that diner—!"

"I know," Adrian whispered, his hands hovering in the air, terrified to touch her, terrified that his mere presence would break her completely. "I know, Sarah. I’m so sorry. I tried to keep you safe. I thought staying away was the only way..."

"Safe?" Sarah laughed, a bitter, hysterical sound that tore at his soul. "You call this safe? They took Lily! Your enemies, your war, your blood—they took my baby because of you!"

Adrian closed his eyes, a single tear cutting a clean path through the soot on his cheek. "She’s coming back, Sarah. I spoke to Dante. He’s bringing her here."

Before Sarah could respond, the heavy metal doors at the front of the warehouse groaned open.

Heavy, deliberate footsteps echoed across the concrete floor.

Adrian stood up instantly, his body snapping back into its lethal, predatory posture. He snatched his Sig Sauer from the desk, flicked off the safety, and stepped out of the office into the main warehouse floor.

Standing twenty yards away, framed by the pouring rain outside the open loading bay, was Dante Rossi.

And in his arms, wrapped tightly in her bright red winter coat, was Lily.

The three-year-old girl looked confused and sleepy, her little brown curls matted with rain, her pale blue-gray eyes blinking against the blinding headlights of a idling black sedan parked outside.

"Stop right there, Adrian!" Dante shouted over the roar of the rain, holding a snub-nosed revolver pressed firmly against Lily’s temple.

Adrian froze. Every muscle in his body turned to stone. The heart monitor hidden beneath his shirt began to beep erratically, a frantic, high-pitched alarm that only he could hear.

"Dante," Adrian said, his voice dropping into a deadly, hypnotic calm. "Let the child go. This is between you and me."

"Oh, it's between us, all right," Dante sneered, taking a step forward into the light, his knuckles white around the grip of his gun. "Look at you. Look at the great Adrian Moretti—shaking, dying, weak. You thought you could build an empire and keep a family on the side? You thought you could have love without blood?"

"Drop the gun, Dante," Adrian warned, taking one slow, calculated step forward.

"Take another step and her brains splatter across this concrete floor," Dante screamed, pressing the barrel a millimeter closer to Lily’s soft temple.

Lily began to whimper, her little lip trembling as she buried her face into Dante’s expensive cashmere coat. "Mummy... I want Mummy..."

Hearing her voice broke something fundamental inside Adrian Moretti. The invincible mob boss, the man who had survived a dozen assassination attempts without blinking, felt his vision turn black at the edges.

"Daddy..." Lily whispered into the empty air, her tiny voice carrying across the cavernous warehouse.

Adrian stopped. His breath hitched.