A RICH WOMAN PAID ME $5,000 TO KISS A STRANGER—THEN I DISCOVERED HE WAS THE CITY'S MOST FEARED MAFIA BOSS. I only wanted enough money to fix my little sister's teeth and keep us from being evicted. The woman who dared me thought she'd found the perfect way to humiliate him, and I was desperate enough to help. But when his guards dragged me toward the exit, he suddenly called my name—and everything changed.

The Metropolitan Club was dripping with generational wealth and silent corruption.

Under the grand vaulted ceilings adorned with Renaissance frescoes, men who controlled the city's real estate, politics, and illicit shipping lanes gathered in clusters, sipping fifty-year-old cognac while their wives flaunted diamonds the size of robin's eggs.

When the oak double doors opened and Ryan Greer entered with me on his arm, the murmur of several hundred elite conversations died instantly.

I felt the immense weight of their collective scrutiny, but I remembered what Ryan had told me in the penthouse: *You hold their lives in your hands.* I lifted my chin, straightened my spine, and matched Ryan’s slow, predatory stride.

My fingers were tucked firmly into the crook of his elbow. Beneath the fine Italian wool of his tuxedo, his arm was as tense as a drawn bowstring. He looked like an emperor surveying his conquered territory.

"Look at that," a socialite whispered behind a flutter of her lace fan. "Is that... the girl from last night?"

"The catering girl? Ryan Greer brought a servant to the Council dinner?"

"Look at her finger! Dear God, is that the Greer heirloom diamond?"

Whispers erupted like a swarm of angry hornets. Ryan didn't even twitch. He guided me smoothly through the parting crowd toward the grand marble staircase, nodding with cool, lethal indifference to city councilmen and shipping magnates who practically bowed out of his path.

"You're doing well," Ryan murmured, leaning down so his mouth brushed the edge of my ear. The warmth of his lips sent a shiver straight down to my toes. "Relax your shoulders, Diane. You look like you’re waiting for an executioner."

"I am standing in a room full of executioners," I muttered under my breath, maintaining a radiant, rehearsed smile. "Including you."

The corner of Ryan’s mouth quirked upward in a rare, genuine half-smirk. "Fair point."

Before we could reach the upper tier, the crowd parted sharply, and two figures blocked our path.

Marcus Voss. And his daughter, Catherine.

Marcus Voss was a burly, silver-haired man in his late fifties with cold, reptilian blue eyes and the broad shoulders of a former dockworker who had murdered his way to a boardroom. Beside him, Catherine was dressed in an extravagant gold lame gown, but her face was pale, her lips pinched with a mixture of rage and terror.

"Greer," Marcus Voss said, his gravelly voice echoing in the sudden pocket of silence. "I didn't think you had the stomach to show your face after the scene Catherine described at the St. Regis."

"Your daughter has an overactive imagination, Marcus," Ryan replied smoothly, not a hint of tension in his posture. "She thought she could pull a childish prank. I simply educated her on the price of bad manners."

Marcus’s cold eyes shifted from Ryan directly to me. A flicker of recognition hit his face, followed swiftly by a wave of cold realization.

"Diane Harper," Marcus rasped, his voice dropping into a dangerous rasp. "Well, well. Arthur’s little girl. I thought you were starving in some roach-infested borough across the river."

My blood ran cold. The man standing three feet from me was the man who had ordered the truck to smash my parents' car into twisted scrap metal. The man who had stolen Sadie’s childhood and left me to drown under mountains of debt.

Rage—hot, blinding, and reckless—surged through my veins, obliterating every trace of fear.

I took a half-step forward, tightening my grip on Ryan’s arm, and looked Marcus Voss dead in the eyes.

"I'm not starving, Mr. Voss," I said, my voice ringing clear and steady across the silent hall. "In fact, I've never eaten better. But I hear your cargo ships in Newark are running empty this morning. That must be terribly expensive for you."

Several guests gasped audibly.

Marcus’s face turned an ugly, mottled shade of crimson. His fists clenched at his sides. Catherine grabbed her father's sleeve, whispering desperately, "Daddy, don't..."

"You insolent little bitch," Marcus snarled, taking a threatening step toward me. "Your father didn't know when to shut his mouth, and it seems you inherited his stupidity. Do you have any idea who you're talking to?"

Before Marcus could finish his sentence, Ryan moved.

It was so fast, so effortless, that it barely looked human. In the span of a heartbeat, Ryan stepped between Marcus and me. His hand shot out, wrapping around Marcus Voss’s throat like an iron vice, lifting the two-hundred-pound man onto his tiptoes against the marble balustrade.

The entire ballroom shrieked in horror. Security guards rushed forward, but Victor and four Greer syndicate enforcers materialized from the shadows, their hands sliding inside their jackets, freezing the venue security in place with lethal glares.

"Ryan! Stop!" Catherine screamed.

Ryan didn't flinch. He squeezed his fingers slightly, and Marcus Voss gagged, his face turning purple, his hands clawing uselessly at Ryan’s wrist.

"Let me make this crystal clear for you, Marcus," Ryan whispered, his voice vibrating with absolute, demonic fury. "Diane Harper is my fiancée. She bears my name, she wears my ring, and she sleeps in my bed. If you raise your voice to her again, if you speak her dead father's name, or if your shadow so much as crosses the same sidewalk as her sister..."

Ryan leaned in until his nose was an inch from Marcus’s bulging eyes.

"...I will not just sink your ships. I will slaughter every man who carries the Voss name and feed them to the Hudson river crabs. Do you understand me?"

Marcus managed a frantic, choking nod.

Ryan released him. Marcus dropped to his knees, coughing violently, clutching his bruised throat on the pristine marble floor.

Ryan turned his back on them as if they were nothing more than discarded garbage. He reached out his arm to me, his storm-gray eyes softening just a fraction.

"Shall we get a glass of champagne, my love?" he asked casually.

I stared at him, my heart hammering against my ribs like a wild bird in a cage. I had just witnessed the monster the entire city feared—a man of terrifying violence. But as I placed my small, trembling hand back into his iron grasp, a strange, intoxicating warmth flooded my chest.

He had defended me. He had avenged my father’s honor in front of the entire world.