CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS DON

The first bullet took out the study’s remaining window entirely.

Elena hit the floor before she’d consciously decided to move, glass raining down around her in a glittering, terrible shower.

Dominic was already crouched beside her, gun drawn, his body angled between her and the door like a wall built of pure instinct.

“Marco!” Dominic shouted, voice cutting clean through the chaos. “Status.”

“Three in the front hall, maybe four!” Marco’s voice came back from somewhere near the staircase, ragged and breathless. “Two of ours are down. Not dead, just down!”

“Get Tony,” Elena gasped, gripping Dominic’s sleeve.

“Marco, please, my brother is upstairs, he can’t even walk right now, somebody has to…”

“On it,” Marco called, already moving, and she heard his footsteps pounding up the stairs two at a time.

“Elena, look at me.” Dominic’s hands found her face, forcing her focus away from the chaos and onto him, dark eyes steady despite everything falling apart around them. “I need you to stay low and stay behind me. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” she said, though her voice shook badly.

“Dominic, I’m scared.”

“Good,” he said, and it wasn’t unkind, it was almost gentle. “Scared means you’ll listen to me instead of trying to be brave. Brave gets people killed. Scared keeps them alive.”

Another burst of gunfire erupted from the front hall, closer now, and Dominic’s jaw tightened.

“Stay here,” he said. “Behind the desk. Do not move.”

“Where are you going?”

“To remind Giovanni’s men exactly why nobody attacks this house twice.”

He was gone before she could argue, moving low and fast toward the study door, and Elena pressed herself into the small gap behind the heavy oak desk, heart slamming so hard against her ribs she thought it might actually crack them.

The next several minutes stretched into something that felt like hours. Shouting. More gunfire, further away now, moving toward the back of the property. A crash that sounded like a body hitting furniture.

She squeezed her eyes shut and thought, absurdly, of the coffee mug still sitting cold on the kitchen counter, black, one sugar, and wondered if this was truly how it all ended, crouched behind a desk in a house full of ghosts and secrets she’d only just begun to understand.

“Elena.”

She nearly screamed before recognizing Tony’s voice, hoarse and terrified, as he half stumbled, half was carried into the study by Marco, one arm slung over the older man’s shoulders.

“Tony,” she breathed, scrambling up to help ease him down beside her. “Are you hit?”

“No, just slow,” Tony muttered, wincing. “Turns out getting shot at is significantly worse when you already feel like you got hit by a truck yesterday. Ten out of ten, do not recommend.”

Despite the terror clawing through her chest, Elena felt a startled, disbelieving laugh escape her. “Only you would make jokes during an actual gunfight.”

“Somebody has to,” Tony said, attempting a grin that came out more grimace. “Dominic certainly isn’t going to. Man’s got two settings. Terrifying, and slightly less terrifying.”

“He’s out there right now,” Elena said, the laugh dying as quickly as it had come, fear rushing back in to fill the space. “Marco, is he going to be all right?”

Marco’s face was grim as he crouched beside the door, gun steady in his hands, eyes fixed on the hallway beyond. “Dominic has survived worse odds than this. Trust me. I’ve watched him do it more times than I can count.”

“That’s not actually reassuring,” Elena said.

“It wasn’t meant to be reassuring,” Marco admitted.

“It was meant to be true.”

The gunfire outside seemed to be slowing, sporadic now instead of constant, and Elena felt her hope rise and crash in agonizing waves with every passing second of silence.

Then, footsteps. Fast, uneven, approaching the study door.

Marco’s gun snapped up, aimed and ready, before the shape in the doorway resolved into Dominic himself, blood on his temple, jacket torn at the shoulder, but upright, breathing, alive.

“Dominic,” Elena gasped, and she was across the room before she’d even decided to move, throwing her arms around him with a force that made him grunt in surprise.

“I’m all right,” he said into her hair, one arm coming around her while the other still held his weapon low, ready. “Elena, I’m all right, it’s over.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Grazed. Nothing serious.” He pulled back just enough to look at her, cataloguing her face with the same desperate thoroughness she’d seen at the front door two days ago, checking for damage. “Are you hurt? Tony?”

“We’re fine,” Tony called from the floor, raising a weak thumbs up. “Bruised, terrified, but structurally sound.”

“Giovanni’s men?” Marco asked, lowering his weapon slightly.

“Two dead. The rest ran when they realized this wasn’t going to be the easy strike they were promised.” Dominic’s expression darkened. “This wasn’t Giovanni testing boundaries. This was a message. He wanted us distracted, off balance, and he used his own statement about Elena as cover to slip men through a side entrance while we were all standing in the garden having a very different, very overdue conversation.”

The reminder of what had been said in that garden crashed back over Elena all at once, the photographs, the lie, seven years stolen by a fabrication built to protect a legacy that had never deserved protecting in the first place.

“Dominic,” she said quietly. “About what Marco told us…”

“Not now.” His hand found hers, fingers lacing through hers with a desperation that spoke louder than any words could have. “Please, Elena. Not until I know this house is secure and everyone in it is safe. I cannot hold that conversation and this crisis in my hands at the same time. I will shatter.”

She nodded, understanding more than he probably realized, and let him pull her closer, her forehead resting against his shoulder while chaos settled slowly into an uneasy, watchful calm around them.

“For what it’s worth,” Tony said from the floor, breaking the heavy silence with the particular tactlessness of a younger sibling who had clearly decided now was exactly the wrong time for levity, “I leave the city for six years, and this is what I come back to find. My sister’s living with a mob boss who apparently has feelings, we just survived a home invasion, and nobody’s offered me so much as an aspirin.”

A startled, exhausted laugh broke from Dominic, unexpected and real, and even Marco’s mouth twitched despite the blood still drying near the doorway.

“Marco,” Dominic said, “get the boy some aspirin. And somebody call a doctor for that laceration on his ribs before Elena decides to murder me herself for neglecting it.”

“On it,” Marco said, hauling Tony up with surprising gentleness for a man who’d been firing a weapon minutes earlier.

Left alone again, Dominic turned back to Elena, and the weight of everything unsaid pressed heavy between them once more.

“There’s a peace meeting,” he said quietly. “Giovanni will demand one now, after tonight, some show of civility to save face publicly while he plans his next move privately. I have to attend. I have to sit across from the man who just tried to kill everyone in this house and pretend, for the sake of appearances, that we’re simply discussing business.”

“When?” Elena asked.

“Three days.” His eyes met hers, dark and unreadable and full of something that made her chest ache. “And Elena, I need you to understand something before that meeting happens. Whatever Giovanni intends by demanding it, whatever game he’s playing, I have a terrible feeling this so called peace talk is not going to end the way anyone at that table expects it to.”