I traced the crest etched into the tarnished metal: a coiled viper wrapped around a shattered crown. The emblem of the Valenti crime family. The same bloodline that had ambushed my father’s motorcade twenty years ago, leaving him dead in a rain-slicked alleyway and handing me the bloody reigns of the Morelli empire at nineteen.

Time slowed down to a crawl.

I didn't think; I reacted. Grabbing the heavy wooden bedside table, I hurled it across the room just as the first shot echoed with a muffled thwack. The bullet tore through the wood instead of Elena’s chest.

I pulled my custom Kimber .45 from my shoulder holster and fired twice.

The first bullet caught the lead assassin in the throat; the second punched through his chest, dropping him instantly to the floor. The second attacker lunged forward, but Marco charged into the room like a bull, tackling the man into the glass partition, shattering it into a thousand shimmering shards.

The third assassin aimed his gun directly at me, but I didn't flinch. I squeezed the trigger once. The hollow-point round took him right between the eyes. He collapsed backward into the hallway, pooling blood across the white tile.

Alarm bells began to ring loudly throughout the hospital, blaring a high-pitched frantic siren that echoed in the corridor.

“Clear!” Marco roared, wiping a cut on his forehead as he stood over the unconscious assassin he had tackled. “Boss, we have to move! The police will be here in three minutes, and if there are three shooters, there are twenty more outside!”

I turned back to Elena. The erratic beeping had turned into a flat, agonizing tone.

“Doctor!” I roared into the hallway. “GET IN HERE NOW!”

Dr. Evans ran inside, pale and trembling, followed by two nurses. “Step back! We need to revive her!”

I grabbed the doctor by his bloodied lapels, pulling him so close he could see his own reflection in my pupils. “If her heart stops, yours stops next. Keep her alive until I come back for her.”

I threw him toward the bed, turned to Marco, and jammed the silver key into my pocket.

“Where are we going, Julian?” Marco asked as we rushed down the service stairs, our shoes pounding against the concrete steps while gunshots echoed from the lower levels.

“The Saint Regis,” I spat, slamming through the fire exit into the rainy Manhattan night. “And then I’m going to kill my uncle.”

Ten minutes later, my armored Maybach tore through the empty, rain-drenched streets of Midtown. Rain lashed against the bulletproof glass like throwing knives. In the backseat, I wiped the dried blood off my knuckles with a linen handkerchief, my mind racing faster than the engine.

Elena Carter wasn't just a nurse.

Six months ago, she had walked into my life looking like an innocent angel in cartoon scrubs. But an angel wouldn't know about the secret vaults of the Saint Regis Hotel. An angel wouldn't be recognized by a dying hitman. And an angel wouldn't warning me about my Uncle Dominic—the man who had helped me rebuild the Morelli empire from the ashes of my father’s death.

“Marco,” I said, looking out at the neon lights blurring through the rain. “Call the Saint Regis. Tell the manager on duty that Julian Morelli is coming. Tell him if Box 409 is missing so much as a speck of dust when I arrive, I will burn the entire hotel to the ground.”

“On it, Boss,” Marco said, reaching for his satellite phone. But before he could dial, he froze, staring at the screen. “Julian... look at this.”

He handed me an encrypted tablet. A live security feed from my private Manhattan office—the office I had left less than an hour ago—was streaming on the screen.

The heavy mahogany doors were blown off their hinges. Three masked men were systematically tearing my desk apart, smashing the wood, tearing up the floorboards. Sitting in my executive leather chair, casually sipping from my crystal decanter of twenty-year-old scotch, was a man wearing a bespoke Italian suit.

He looked up directly at the security camera, raised his glass in a silent toast, and smiled.