The laundry room at the Moretti estate was large enough to house a commercial hotel's operations, smelling perpetually of bleach, hot steam, and expensive lavender detergent.

Panic surged through Clara's veins, sharper and more terrifying than anything she had felt when Grant stood at the security gate.

It wasn't about her anymore. It was about Matteo.

If Viktor Petrov used her as bait to trap the mafia boss, Matteo would walk straight into the crossfire without a second thought because of the protection he had sworn to give her.

"I have to warn him," Clara breathed, turning toward the study's private communications phone.

Before she could take a step, Bianca lunged forward with surprising speed, grabbing Clara by the arm and shoving her backward against the heavy bookshelves. Leather-bound books tumbled to the floor with loud thuds.

"You're going nowhere!" Bianca snarled, her aristocratic composure entirely shattered. "You are going to sit right here and wait for your Russian friends to collect you. Once Matteo is dead, you'll be nothing more than a corpse in an alley, and life will return to normal!"

Clara gritted her teeth. The old Clara—the frightened, broken woman who had spent years absorbing abuse—would have frozen in terror.

But the woman standing here now had spent the last month learning what it meant to survive in Matteo Moretti's world.

With a sharp twist of her body, Clara wrenched her arm free from Bianca's grip, spun around, and drove the heavy brass desk lamp straight into Bianca's shoulder, sending the other woman sprawling backward onto the Persian rug with a shriek of indignation.

Clara didn't look back. She sprinted toward the double doors, pulled them open, and ran down the grand hallway toward the estate's central security station.

"Leo!" she screamed as she burst into the control room.

Leo spun around in his chair, his hand instantly dropping to the holster of his firearm. When he saw Clara panting and terrified, he relaxed his grip. "Clara? What's wrong?"

"It's a trap!" Clara gasped, struggling to catch her breath. "Grant... Grant sold me out to the Russian Bratva! They're coming to ambush Matteo! Where is he?!"

Leo's face turned grim in a fraction of a second. He grabbed his radio comms unit. "All units, code red. Perimeter breach alert. The boss is heading back from the downtown summit via the North Expressway. Sector Four—"

Before Leo could finish his sentence, the overhead lights in the security room flickered violently and died, plunging the estate into pitch darkness, save for the emergency backup generators humming softly in the basement.