Two years after a sniper’s bullet left me unable to walk, everyone who worked inside my mansion had learned the same rule: stay out of my way.

The warmth pressed against my side was real, but it was the silence in the room that felt suffocating.

My right hand remained locked around the cold, textured grip of the sig sauer hidden beneath my pillow. For two years, survival had been reduced to muscle memory and paranoia. A man in a wheelchair who runs an empire built on shadows does not get the luxury of dropping his guard. When you cannot run, every shadow becomes a potential grave, and every unexpected touch is treated as a prelude to violence.

Slowly, without making a sound, I turned my head on the pillow.

Emma was curled on her side, her knees drawn up toward her chest as if she were trying to make herself as small as humanly without disappearing entirely. Her dark hair was tangled across her face, damp with a fine sheen of cold sweat. She was still wearing her navy-blue maid’s tunic, though the top two buttons were undone, revealing her pale, hollow collarbones. She looked impossibly small in my broad, iron-framed bed—like a child who had crawled into a quiet corner to escape a storm.

Then my eyes moved down to her right hand, which rested inches from my hip.

Her fingers were loosely curled around an object that reflected the faint, blueish light filtering through the heavy velvet curtains.

It was not a weapon. It was not a knife, nor was it a quiet, suppressed pistol meant to finish what the sniper’s bullet had started two years ago on the steps of the Cook County courthouse.

It was a glass syringe.

The plunger was pressed halfway down, and inside the cylinder remained two CCs of a thick, pale amber fluid. Beside her curled knuckles lay a tiny, crushed glass ampoule, its gold-lettered label half-scraped away, though I could still make out the faint, sharp fragment of a medical logo: N-14.

My heart slammed against my ribs like an iron fist.

My mind raced through every poison, every paralytic, every chemical contract-kill method I had ever encountered in the subterranean world of Chicago’s organized underworld. A quiet injection while the target slept. An embolism. An undetectable cardiac arrest designed to look like my ruined body had finally given out under the stress of phantom pain and central nervous system collapse.

I released the grip of my gun, reached out with my left hand, and wrapped my fingers firmly around her wrist.

I didn't snatch the syringe. I trapped her arm against the mattress, pinning her joints with the precise, brutal leverage I had used long before I lost the use of my legs.

Emma didn't gasp. She didn't scream. Her eyes snapped open instantly—wide, bloodshot, and filled with a cold, desperate terror that had nothing to do with being caught.

She stared up at me through the dim light of the bedroom. Her chest heaved beneath the damp tunic.

"Danny," she whispered. Her voice was cracked, paper-thin, and completely stripped of the quiet defiance she usually carried through my hallways.

"Give me one reason," I said, my voice dropping into a rasp that could cut glass, "why I shouldn't break your wrist right now and let Luke find out who paid you."

Emma didn't pull away against my grip. She didn't have the strength. Her arm was trembling violently under my fingers, her skin burning hot—far too hot for a normal room.

"It... it wasn't for you," she breathed, her teeth chattering so hard I could hear them clicking in the dark. "It was... for me."

I narrowed my eyes, refusing to loosen my hold. "You crawled into my bed with a syringe full of an unregistered compound, Emma. Do you think I'm stupid?"

"I couldn't... I couldn't reach the servant's quarters," she choked out. A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye, tracking down her temple into her hair. "The hallway... the pain hit... I couldn't walk. Your door was open. I just... I needed to lie down before I passed out. I dropped the bottle..."

She squeezed her eyes shut as a violent spasm racked her torso. Her spine arched off the mattress, her knuckles turning white as her body fought against whatever was coursing through her veins.

I stared at her, my tactical mind desperately trying to reframe the scene.

She hadn't injected me. My skin was untouched. The needle sat untouched between us, its cap removed, but the tip resting against the dark sheets without a drop of blood on it. The sweat pouring off her wasn't the result of fear; it was systemic shock.

"What is that?" I demanded, nodding toward the syringe.

"An experimental blocker," she gasped, her voice barely audible now. Her eyes rolled back slightly under her eyelids. "For the nerve deterioration. My... my mother... she had it first. It’s genetic. If I don't take it... the spasms kill the heart."

She stopped speaking. Her head fell back against the pillow, her body going completely limp against my side, her hand slipping from my grasp as her fingers uncurled. The glass syringe rolled across the silk sheet, coming to rest against my paralyzed left thigh.

I sat there in the dark, my heart hammering in my ears, looking at the unconscious woman lying beside me.

I reached down, picked up the glass syringe, and held it up to the faint morning light breaking through the window. The pale amber liquid was perfectly clear, devoid of air bubbles. Beside her hand, the crushed glass ampoule revealed the rest of the torn label: Neuro-Regen Phase II: Subject Trial Only.

This wasn't a hit.

Emma Carter wasn't an assassin sent by my rivals in the South Side syndicates. She was a dying woman trying to work two jobs to stay alive, injecting herself with black-market experimental nerve drugs in the dark corners of my house just to keep her legs from giving out while she scrubbed my floors.

I stared at her pale, still face. For two years, I had believed I was the only person in this ten-million-dollar tomb who lived in a private hell of ruined nerves and burning pain.