The rain over Seattle didn’t fall so much as it drowned the city, sweeping off Puget Sound in icy sheets that rattled the glass windows of the emergency transport van.

"Anesthesia is in! Starting epidural block!"

"Vitals are sliding! BP 72/40!"

"Scallop knife! We have to get the infant out now!"

I was paralyzed from the chest down, but I could feel the cold pressure of the scalpel dragging across my skin. Above the blue surgical curtain that blocked my view, Damian stood like an impenetrable shield. He held both of my hands squeezed in his left palm. In his right hand, he held his encrypted satellite phone, his thumb hovering over a speed-dial button.

"Damian..." I gasped, the oxygen mask over my nose and mouth fogging up with every desperate breath. "I'm cold..."

"I know, baby. I know," he murmured, his voice cracking as he leaned down to kiss my brow, my nose, my trembling lips. "Look at me. Don't look at the monitors. Look at your husband."

"Ex-husband..." I whispered faintly, a tiny, sad attempt at a joke.

"I never signed those papers, Elena," Damian confessed, his eyes swimming with dark, fiercely possessive tears. "The divorce decree you received in the mail? It was a forgery generated by Noah's legal team to force you out of the penthouse. I never let you go. I could never let you go."

My heart hammered against my ribs. "What...?"

"You are my wife," he said, his voice ringing with a fierce, unbreakable conviction. "You have always been my wife. I let you run because I thought I was making you miserable. I thought you hated the security, the guards, the life I built. I thought leaving me was the only way you could breathe. If I had known..." He pressed his forehead against mine, his tears hot against my cheeks. "If I had known you were carrying my child, I would have burned the city to the ground before letting you walk away."

"Incision made! Suction!" the lead surgeon shouted. "We have heavy internal bleeding! Get two units of O-negative on the line!"

The room was a frenzy of motion. I felt a sudden, sickening tugging sensation in my abdomen. The pressure was enormous, as if my insides were being torn apart.

"She's out!" a nurse yelled.

Silence fell over the operating room.

It was a heavy, suffocating silence that made the blood run cold in my veins. There was no crying. No high-pitched, angry newborn screech. Nothing except the mechanical hum of the room and the sound of my own frantic panting.

"Why isn't she crying?!" I screamed, trying to sit up, but Damian held me down gently, his eyes wide with absolute horror as he looked over the blue curtain. "Damian! Why isn't she breathing?!"

Over the curtain, I saw the pediatrician frantically working on a tiny, pale body beneath a warmer light. They were suctioning her tiny mouth, rubbing her back with sterile towels.

"Come on, little girl," the pediatrician muttered under his breath. "Come on. Breathe for me."

Damian let go of my hands. He stepped around the curtain, his tall frame looming over the stainless-steel warming table where our daughter lay motionless.

The doctors tried to push him back, but he ignored them completely. He reached out one long, trembling, blood-stained finger and gently pressed it into the tiny, tiny palm of the infant.

"Listen to me, little one," Damian said, his voice echoing with an unnatural, chilling authority that seemed to freeze the entire room. "Your mother spent eight months protecting you in the dark. I spent eight months failing you. You do not die today. Do you hear me? You stay with us."

As if responding to the sheer, terrifying force of her father's will, the newborn's chest gave a sharp, sudden hitch.

A tiny, weak gasp.

Then, a high-pitched, furious, beautiful scream echoed through Operating Room 4.

WAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAH!

"We have a pulse!" the nurse shouted, letting out a massive breath of relief. "Spontaneous respiration! Color is returning! Oxygen saturation is climbing to ninety percent!"

I collapsed back against the pillow, tears flowing down my temples into my hair as the sound of our daughter’s furious cries filled the air.

Damian stood frozen over the warming table. The ruthless, terrifying ruler of Seattle's underworld dropped his face into his hands, his broad shoulders shaking violently as he wept uncontrollably beside his daughter.

The door to the operating room swung open abruptly.

A man dressed in a dark tactical suit, his chest covered in body armor, stepped inside. It was Marcus Vance, Damian's secondary head of security—the man who had been kept away from the inner circle by Noah for months.

"Boss," Marcus said, his voice flat, professional, and urgent. "We tracked Noah's vehicle. He didn't flee the city."

Damian wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, his tears instantly hardening into pure, unadulterated venom. He turned slowly, looking down at our baby girl, then back at me.

"Where is he?" Damian asked softly.

"He's at the penthouse," Marcus reported. "He cleared out your private vault, executed two of our night guards, and set a thirty-minute thermite charges sequence on the main server floor. He’s liquidating your entire network."