"They were about to fire this broke waitress for abandoning her tables—then the mafia boss discovered she had taken a glass shard meant for his son. I was a broke waitress nobody noticed until I threw myself over a little boy to shield him from flying glass—then he whispered “Papa” to the most feared crime boss in the room, and suddenly every armed man was staring at me.

The world seemed to stop spinning. The room tilted violently on its axis.

"Hit?" I whispered, my voice barely audible above the hum of the emergency lights. "What do you mean hit?"

"They rammed his convoy with a semi-truck near the bridge," Gavin gritted out, wincing as he held his ribs. "His car went over the embankment. We lost radio contact twenty minutes ago."

I stared at him, my brain refusing to process the words. Luca, the immovable cliff, the man who owned the city, was gone? Unconscious? Dead?

A heavy thud shook the steel door from the outside.

Then another.

"Open the door, girl!" Frank Vance's raspy, cruel voice boomed through the small ventilation grille above the door. "We know you're in there with the kid! Gavin's dead or dying, and Moretti is at the bottom of the river! You have ten seconds before we set off a breacher charge!"

Gavin tried to stand, pulling a sleek black pistol from his holster, but his legs gave out and he slid back down the wall, coughing blood onto the concrete floor. "Take... take the gun, Claire," he gasped, pushing the weapon into my hands. "Don't let them take Mateo."

The metal was cold, heavy, and terrifying in my trembling hands. I had never touched a gun in my life. I was a waitress. I fixer of broken plastic dinosaurs. I was a girl who counted nickels to buy bread.

I looked at the heavy steel door vibrating under another blow from a sledgehammer.

Then I looked back at the alcove where Mateo was hidden, his small body shaking in silence, his huge brown eyes fixed on me with absolute trust.

Don't let anybody teach you to become ashamed of surviving. My mother's old words echoed in my mind, clear and sharp as a silver bell.

I stood up. I took off my heavy wool sweater, wrapping it tightly around my bleeding left forearm to act as padding. I thumbed the safety switch off on the pistol, just as I had seen Luca do a dozen times in the library.

"Vance!" I shouted toward the ventilation grille, my voice steady, cold, and entirely devoid of fear.

The pounding stopped. "Smart girl," Vance sneered from the hallway. "Slide the bolt and walk out with your hands up. Maybe I'll let you live as a maid in my house."

"Luca isn't dead," I said, stepping right up to the heavy door, aligning myself with the narrow observation slot. "And if you detonate a charge against this door, the pressure wave will trigger the automatic halon fire suppression system in the ceiling. It will flood that hallway with nitrogen in five seconds. You'll choke to death before you ever see his son."

It was a total, complete lie. The room didn't have halon gas; it had simple sprinklers. But Vance didn't know that.

There was a long, tense silence in the hallway.

"She's bluffing," one of Vance's men muttered through the door.

"Try me," I said coldly, raising the pistol and aiming it directly at the steel center of the door. "I have nothing to lose, Vance. I was a broke waitress six weeks ago. But today, I am holding the gun. Step away from the door, or we all die in this hallway."

A heavy, suffocating silence descended on the estate.

Then, from far down the grand corridor outside, a new sound echoed through the stone halls.

It wasn't a sledgehammer.

It was the steady, heavy, rhythmic thud of leather boots walking across marble floors.