"Buried Alive, Betrayed by the Bride: The Mafia Boss Who Heard Every Word"

I sat in the corner of the back seat, my bruised wrists wrapped in a linen handkerchief Roman had torn from his own breast pocket. He hadn't let me touch it myself. He had taken my hand—his fingers surprisingly cool and steady—and bound the raw skin with the clinical precision of a field surgeon.

“Where are we going?” I asked. My voice was no longer a whisper, but it sounded like glass being dragged across pavement.

“Not to Highlandtown,” Roman said without looking at me. He was staring out the window at the neon lights of the harbor district reflecting in the wet asphalt. “Your apartment was searched forty minutes ago. The lock was picked, and someone turned the mattress over.”

My heart gave a violent, sick lurch. “Caleb—?”

“Caleb is at St. Jude’s Pediatric Annex under three armed guards provided by my personal detail,” Roman interrupted, his tone flat, devoid of any emotional color. “Mrs. Adler is with him. She’s currently drinking her third cup of chamomile tea and threatening to hit my head of security with her broom because he won't let her watch her serials.”

I exhaled a breath I felt like I’d been holding since Evelyn’s men dragged me out of the grocery store last Tuesday.

“Why?” I asked, staring at the side of his face—the sharp line of his cheekbone, the faint white scar running from his temple into his hairline where a crane cable had snapped back in ’18. “Evelyn said… she said you were restructuring the household. She said I was a liability.”

Roman turned his head slowly. His grey eyes were like chips of flint in the dim cabin light.

“Evelyn Sterling is the daughter of a man who owes my shipping lines four million dollars in customs fines,” Roman said quietly. “She spends her weekends snorting lime-cut cocaine in Fells Point and imagining she has the political weight to broker a merger between her father’s bankrupt timber company and my logistics network. She is an idiot.”

“She had keys to your side gate,” I pointed out.

“Everyone in this city has keys to something they shouldn't,” Roman replied, his voice dropping an octave. “The question is why she thought she could dispose of my private cook without asking me.”

I blinked, the exhaustion finally pulling the edges of my vision into a grey fog. “Your… cook? Is that all I am to you, Mr. Calder? An entry in the payroll ledger?”

Roman didn't answer immediately. The car turned off the main highway, rolling through the wrought-iron gates of an estate that sat on a jagged outcrop of rock overlooking the Chesapeake Bay—a place the locals called The Rookery. It was a fortress of grey stone, slate roofs, and ten-foot perimeter walls topped with motion-sensitive cameras.

The car stopped under the grand portico.

Before the driver could even cut the ignition, Roman had opened his door and was walking around to my side. He pulled the handle before I could reach for it, his large frame blocking out the cold coastal wind.

“Get out,” he said.

“I need to go back to my brother—”

“Your brother is eating oatmeal in a secure facility with three bodyguards who would die before letting a fly land on his porridge,” Roman said, his hands gripping me by the elbows—not roughly, but with an immovable firmness that brooked no argument. He lifted me out of the car as if I weighed no more than an empty crate. “And you are coming inside to let Dr. Aris check those wrists before gangrene sets in.”

“I can walk, Mr. Calder.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Sir?”

“My name is Roman,” he said, his face inches from mine as he carried me up the wide granite steps toward the heavy oak doors of the mansion. The light from the foyer fell across his features, highlighting the dark circles under his eyes—the exhaustion of a man who hadn't slept since my disappearance six days ago. “And you haven't called me ‘sir’ since the second month you worked here, Clara. Not after you threw a cup of lukewarm espresso at my head because I tried to work through a migraine.”

I felt a strange, absurd bubble of laughter rise in my throat, though my eyes were stinging with salt.

“You deserved it,” I whispered against the wool of his lapel. “You were bleeding on the balance sheets.”

“I was,” he admitted, his voice surprisingly soft as the heavy doors swung open to reveal the warm, cavernous expanse of the marble hallway. “And you replaced them with a muffin that tasted like cardboard and a note telling me if I didn't sleep for six hours, you’d resign.”