The heavy click of Vincent Moretti’s leather shoes against the imported mahogany flooring sounded like a firing squad loading their chambers one by one.

The heavy click of Vincent Moretti’s leather shoes against the imported mahogany flooring sounded like a firing squad loading their chambers one by one. Every man at the black conference table sat carved in stone, their eyes darting between their boss's broad shoulders and my miserable, soaking figure. The plastic blue bucket felt like it weighed fifty pounds, and the mop tucked under my arm seemed ready to slide down and announce my panic with a loud clatter.

I didn't back away. In that fraction of a second, humiliation hardened into a strange, reckless kind of courage. If Vincent Moretti was going to have me thrown out into the freezing Chicago night, he was going to do it while I was looking him square in the eye, not while whimpering on his pristine carpet.

He stopped three feet away. Up close, his height was oppressive. His dark eyes didn't look angry; they looked clinical, analyzing me the way a homicide detective inspects a fresh crime scene. A faint scent of cedar and expensive cologne cut through the damp smell of mop water.

“You’re Elena Vance,” he said. His voice was low, smooth, and lacked any inflection that could give away his next move. It was the voice of a man who decided whether people lived or died before breakfast.

“Last time I checked,” I muttered, my voice tight despite my best efforts. “Unless the municipal water department legally adopted me when that pipe blew.”

A sharp intake of breath hissed through the teeth of the man seated to Vincent’s right—a scarred enforcer whose nametag might as well have read Danger. But Vincent didn’t flinch. Instead, a microscopic twitch of amusement flickered at the corner of his mouth before vanishing back into granite.

“You tracked gray water across four hundred thousand dollars of hand-carved Italian parquet,” Vincent said smoothly, his gaze dropping to my soaked shoe, which was currently creating a small, pathetic puddle. “And your choice of introductory remarks was asking a room full of federal targets for hand towels.”

“If you have a better proposal for stopping a flash flood in a wing built during the Gilded Age, I’m entirely open to suggestions, Mr. Moretti,” I snapped. The exhaustion of eleven days of working seventy-hour weeks under a roof full of stone-cold killers finally punctured my fear. “Otherwise, you can either let me mop up the hallway before it ruins the drywall, or you can explain to your insurance provider why your conference room is suddenly hosting a trout farm.”

Silence settled back over the room, thick enough to cut with a butcher's knife. The eight men around the table stopped breathing. In Moretti’s world, people didn’t talk back. They didn’t offer sarcastic comebacks when cornered by the most dangerous syndicate leader in the Midwest. They begged, they shook, or they disappeared.

Vincent stared at me for three agonizing seconds. Then, slowly, he raised his right hand—the one wrapped in a black leather glove—and signaled toward the scarred enforcer.

“Marco,” Vincent murmured, never breaking eye contact with me. “Take the team into the auxiliary library. Finish reviewing the shipping manifests from the docks. I’ll join you in ten minutes.”

Marco blinked, stunned. “Boss, are you sure—?”

“Now, Marco.”

The chairs scraped back in unison. The eight men stood, threw wary glances in my direction as if I were some kind of exotic, venomous animal, and filed out of the room in absolute silence. The heavy oak doors clicked shut behind them, leaving just the two of us alone in the massive, dim hall of power.

Vincent turned his back on me, walked slowly toward the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the storm-swept Chicago skyline, and picked up an crystal glass filled with amber liquid.

“You’ve been here eleven days, Elena,” he said, his back still turned. “Every other employee tip-toes past my door like they’re walking over broken glass. They whisper when I pass. They drop their eyes. You track a gallon of city water into a high-level syndicate briefing and sass me about trout farming.”

“I’m an estate maintenance tech, Mr. Moretti, not a monk,” I said, shifting the bucket to my other hip. “If you wanted terrified sycophants who never speak, you should have kept the last crew. But they quit because the basement ghosts scared them, and your plumbing is seventy years past its expiration date.”

Vincent turned around, leaning back against the glass pane. The city lights cast a sharp, dramatic shadow across his striking, angular features. “The plumbing is fine. The valve in the guest wing was rusted because the previous housekeeper neglected it.”

“Well, the previous housekeeper isn't standing here with a mop sticking out of her armpit, is she?”

A low, deep rumble started in Vincent’s chest. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. It wasn't a warm, joyful laugh—it was dark, rusty, and rare, but it completely transformed his face, stripping away the untouchable mob boss veneer and leaving a man who looked shockingly, dangerously human.

“Get out of my sight, Elena,” he said, though the edge of command was entirely gone from his tone. “Go down to the laundry facility, trade those soaked clothes for something dry from the staff locker, and tell Marco to send the property manager to my study first thing tomorrow morning.”