The champagne glass hit me before I understood someone had thrown it.

One second, I was balancing a silver tray beneath the towering amber chandeliers of Bellamy House, silently calculating whether the twenty-three dollars in my checking account could stretch until my shift pay cleared on Friday. The room smelled of tuberose, burning wax, and vintage Pinot Noir.

The next second, something shattered against my shoulder blade.

Glass exploded in a burst of violent heat.

Someone shrieked. A heavy mahogany dining chair scraped across the Italian marble floor like a dying beast. And directly in front of me, a little boy froze.

He couldn’t have been older than six. Dark hair neatly parted, wide hazel-brown eyes, dressed in an immaculate navy suit with a red silk bow tie. In his small, tight fist, he held a cheap plastic velociraptor that looked entirely out of place in a room where wristwatches cost more than my four-year college debt.

Everyone else reacted to the noise. Socialites ducked. Men reached instinctively for their lapels or their dates.

He didn’t move. He simply stared, mesmerized and paralyzed, at the glittering storm of shards hurtling directly toward his face.

My brain didn’t process fear. It only processed distance.

I dropped the heavy tray. The sound of silver clattering against stone was swallowed by panic as I threw myself forward, hooked my arms around his tiny shoulders, and twisted my torso hard to take the brunt of the impact.

The second glass—a heavy crystal tumbler—struck the curve of my neck and shattered.

Pain ripped through my shoulder like an open flame. A long, jagged spear of crystal sliced down my forearm, and another fragment drove deep into the soft tissue of my lower right flank.

For a heartbeat, there was zero pain. Just an unnatural, icy pressure.

Then hot, thick wetness poured beneath my crisp white server’s uniform, soaking my undershirt in seconds.

The boy vanished beneath the shelter of my chest. And then the entire ballroom went dead silent.

Not quiet.

*Silent.*

The kind of suffocating silence that happens when two hundred ultra-wealthy people suddenly become terrified of the exact same man.

Heavy, measured footsteps echoed against the stone behind me.

“Luca.”

The voice was low. It didn’t boom, but it carried an authority so absolute that the air pressure in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Every patron near our circle shrank back into the shadows.

The child under me gasped. “Papa!”

I forced my chin up. The marble floor was slick, and staying upright took everything I had.

A man in a bespoke black suit was striding toward us. Broad-shouldered, tall, moving with the predatory calm of someone who owned every inch of ground he stepped upon. His dark hair was swept back from a face carved out of granite, marred only by a thin, pale scar slicing through his left eyebrow. His shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, revealing the edge of a dark tattoo coiled against his pulse.

Damian Vescari.

Everyone in Chicago knew that name. Shipping magnate, property empire heir, and—if the hushed rumors in restaurant backrooms were true—a man whose reach into the city’s underworld ran so deep the authorities pretended not to see it.

I had refilled his sparkling water twenty minutes earlier. He hadn’t looked at me once.

Now, he dropped down onto both knees in front of me, completely unconcerned about the broken crystal grinding beneath his expensive slacks.

“Luca.”

“I’m okay, Papa. I’m okay.”

Damian’s dark, calculating eyes swept over his son with surgical precision. No blood. No scratches.

Then his gaze shifted. Directly to me.

His hard jaw tensed. “Miss?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. The words came out thin, trembling like dry paper.

I made the mistake of trying to push myself into a sitting position.

The ballroom tilted violently on its axis. The chandeliers smeared into streaks of yellow light. Something warm and heavy cascaded down my hip and puddled on the floor.

Damian’s hand shot out, catching my upper arm before my skull hit the stone. When his fingers pulled back, they were painted crimson.

His eyes narrowed into terrifying slits. “You’re bleeding out.”

“It’s… just glass,” I whispered, though my breath was coming in shallow, shuddering gasps now.

A woman nearby whimpered. Someone near the bar shouted that they had called emergency services.

Damian ignored all of it. His eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that pinned me to the earth. “What is your name?”

“Emma.”

“Emma what?”

“Emma Carter.”

His gaze darted down to my waist. The white fabric of my shirt was entirely drenched now, a dark, spreading maroon stain that reached from my ribcage to my hip.

Damian glanced over his left shoulder without releasing his grip on my shoulder. “Marco.”

A broad-shouldered man in a charcoal suit materialized at his shoulder like a ghost. “Sir.”

“Seal the exits.”

A murmur of protest rippled through the elite crowd.

“Excuse me?” a man in a tuxedo stammered. “You can’t hold us here, Vescari—”

Damian didn’t even turn his head. “No one leaves this room. Not until I know who brought glass down from the upper tier.”

The room went dead again. No one dared challenge him.

His eyes flicked toward the fractured fragments littering the marble, then shot upward toward the VIP mezzanine above. An iron service door was slowly swinging shut on its hinges.

“Find them,” Damian said softly. “Bring them down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marco vanished.

Luca crawled out from beneath my shaking arms and threw his tiny hands over mine. “You protected me. You’re hurt because of me.”

I forced my lips into a weak smile, fighting back the fog creeping around the edges of my vision. “You’re safe, kiddo. That’s all that counts.”

Damian’s gaze rested on where his son’s fingers were intertwined with mine, sticky with my blood. Something raw and unreadable flickered across his stone-cold face.

“Emma,” Damian murmured, his voice tightening. “Look at me.”

I blinked heavily. “I’m just… really sleepy.”

“Do not close your eyes.” The command was absolute, but underneath it, I heard the faint tremor of something rare for a man like him: dread.

Paramedics burst through the double doors, pushing through the immobilized crowd. Damian yielded only enough space for them to cut away my shredded uniform.

“Pressure’s tanking,” one paramedic yelled to his partner. “Deep laceration in the flank—possible arterial nick. We’re losing her. Move, now!”

They hoisted me onto a gurney. Luca started to sob, running alongside the wheels, his dinosaur toy rolling away across the floor.

“Emma!” he cried.

Damian scooped his son up with one arm, pulling him against his chest, but his dark, burning eyes never left mine. He leaned down toward Marco, his voice carrying clearly above the siren wails outside.

“If Emma Carter survives tonight,” Damian said, loud enough for every soul in the ballroom to hear, “she will never worry about money for the rest of her life.”

My heart stuttered. The world dissolved into gray noise.

“And if she doesn't survive,” Damian added, his voice dropping into pure ice, “find the person responsible before I do.”