Chapter 1 - The Blood on the Marble
The Mafia Boss Carried His Exhausted Maid to His Bed, but What She Was Holding When She Woke Changed Everything
By the time Avery Collins collapsed on the floor of the most dangerous man in Chicago, she had already saved six lives, scrubbed blood from three rooms, and worked for nearly twenty hours without sitting down.
She remembered reaching for one last shard of broken glass.
She remembered thinking, Just finish the study.
Then the room tilted sideways.
What Avery did not remember was Dominic Kane finding her unconscious beneath his desk.
She did not remember the feared mafia boss kneeling beside her.
She did not remember him sliding one arm beneath her shoulders and the other beneath her legs.
And she definitely did not remember the look on two armed guards’ faces when Dominic Kane carried his exhausted, plus-size maid through his mansion as though she were the only person in the building who mattered.
Hours later, Avery opened her eyes in a bed she had spent three years making but had never once imagined sleeping in.
Her hand was wrapped around someone else’s.
A man’s hand.
Large.
Warm.
Callused.
Her breath stopped.
Then a deep voice beside her said, “Don’t move too fast.”
Avery’s eyes flew toward the chair beside the bed.
Dominic Kane was holding her hand.
And watching her as if he had been waiting for her to wake.
Only twelve hours earlier, Avery had believed she understood the rules of Kane House.
Keep your head down.
Do your job.
Never ask questions.
Never repeat what you heard.
And above all, never become interesting to Dominic Kane.
The mansion sat on a private stretch of Lake Michigan north of downtown Chicago, all dark stone, smoked glass, and security cameras hidden beneath the eaves. From the road, it looked like the home of some reclusive billionaire.
People who knew better understood that it was a fortress.
Dominic Kane controlled an empire made from trucking companies, nightclubs, construction contracts, private security firms, and businesses that did not appear on any tax return.
He was thirty-eight, six-foot-four, and famous among the people who feared him for never raising his voice.
He didn’t need to.
When Dominic Kane spoke quietly, everyone listened harder.
Avery had worked in his house for three years.
At thirty-two, she was not what the glamorous women who attended Dominic’s parties considered memorable.
She was soft where they were sculpted.
Wide-hipped, full-bellied, strong-legged, with thick brown curls she usually pinned into a practical knot.
Some of the women whispered that she was too big to move gracefully through a mansion like Kane House.
They were wrong.
Avery moved quietly because she had learned long ago that quiet people survived.
Before she became a housekeeper, she had been an emergency-room nurse at a South Side hospital.
She had been good at it.
Very good.
Then her younger brother, Mason, got involved with a sports-betting operation he could not afford.
When he died in a car accident, Avery discovered he had left behind nearly seventy thousand dollars in debt.
Not all of the men collecting that debt believed death canceled an obligation.
Avery did.
They did not.
Somehow, Dominic Kane had purchased the debt from them.
He had never threatened her. He had never even mentioned it directly.
His house manager simply offered Avery a job with wages high enough to pay it down.
Three years later, she had almost finished.
She planned to leave Kane House quietly.
Go back to nursing.
Find a small apartment where nobody carried guns beneath tailored jackets.
She had fifty-three days left.
Then, on a freezing November night, the front doors exploded open.
Avery was polishing the marble railing in the foyer when shouting erupted outside.
Two guards rushed toward the entrance.
The doors swung inward.
Dominic staggered through them.
Blood covered one side of his charcoal suit.
Behind him came seven men, several wounded badly.
“Doctor!” someone shouted.
“Get Dr. Harris down here!”
Avery froze for exactly one second.
Then training took over.
A man collapsed near the bottom of the staircase, both hands pressed against his thigh while blood pumped between his fingers.
Arterial.
Avery dropped her cleaning cloth.
“You.” She pointed at a stunned guard. “Take off your belt.”
He blinked.
“What?”
“Your belt. Now!”
Something in her voice snapped him into action.
Avery dropped to her knees, secured a tourniquet high around the injured man’s leg, tightened it, and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Stay with me.”
He groaned.
“What’s your name?”
“Cal.”
“Okay, Cal. You’re going to hate me for the next sixty seconds, but you’re staying awake.”
Dr. Harris appeared minutes later, overwhelmed instantly.
Avery became the second pair of hands he desperately needed.
She packed wounds.
She held pressure.
She started IVs.
She recognized the symptoms of a collapsed lung before the doctor finished examining one man.
At one point she looked up and found Dominic standing ten feet away, shirt cut open at the shoulder while someone tried to treat him.
His dark eyes were fixed on her.
Not curious.
Not surprised.
Studying.
Avery looked away.
For the next ten hours, the mansion became a makeshift hospital.
By dawn, nobody else had died.
Dr. Harris sat down heavily in a chair.
“You were an ER nurse.”
Avery peeled off blood-soaked gloves.
May you like
“Five years.”
“Why the hell are you cleaning houses?”
