My wrist still throbbed faintly where my manager had grabbed it.

"Get back to the kitchen, Claire," hissed Thomas, our floor manager, his face pale as chalk. "If Dominic Vale even looks at you sideways, we’re all dead men."

I didn’t move. I couldn't.

My eyes were locked on the little girl standing beside the most feared mafia boss in America. Audrey Vale. Eight years old, trapped in a silent world ever since the horrific car bombing that claimed her mother’s life two years ago. She clutched a frayed, dirt-stained stuffed rabbit like it was a lifeline, her knuckles white, her small frame pressed against Dominic’s immaculate black suit.

And then there was Marcus Vance.

Dominic’s chief advisor and right-hand man. A man with sharp, predatory eyes and a smile that never reached his mouth. When Audrey accidentally knocked over her water glass, soaking Marcus’s expensive Italian silk sleeve, Marcus’s hand had instinctively snapped toward his chest holster.

It was a fraction of a second movement. But Audrey had seen it. Her body had seized up, silent terror tearing through her lungs.

When I broke protocol, walked past the ring of armed bodyguards, knelt down to sign to her in American Sign Language, and exposed Marcus’s burn scars—revealing that he had been in the room when Audrey’s mother was murdered—the temperature in the restaurant plummeted to absolute zero.

Dominic Vale stared at me, his dark eyes narrowing like a loaded pistol.

"You’re fired," Dominic had said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that could make grown men weep.

Marcus had stepped forward, recovering his composure with a slick, poisonous smile. "She’s a crazy waitress trying to make a scene, Dominic. Let me have the boys take care of her outside."

Before Marcus could finish his sentence, Audrey’s tiny fingers gripped my sleeve with desperate, terrifying strength. Her hands flew through the air, spelling out words that detonated inside my brain like a bomb:

Bad man. He hurt Mommy before the bomb. Mommy fought him. Fire burned his hand.

Now, standing in the center of the restaurant with every gun in the room pointed in my direction, Dominic turned his gaze slowly from his daughter to Marcus Vance.

The silence that followed was so profound you could hear the distant hum of traffic outside on Michigan Avenue.

"Marcus," Dominic said softly.

Marcus laughed nervously, taking half a step backward. "Dominic, you aren't listening to an 8-year-old deaf child and a rogue waitress, are you? It's absurd! My burn scars came from a kitchen accident in Miami three years ago!"

Dominic didn’t blink. He raised his hand, a universal signal that stopped every single bodyguard in their tracks.

"Show me your wrist, Marcus."

"Boss—"

"Show me your fucking wrist."

Marcus’s face lost every drop of blood. Slowly, agonizingly, he pulled back his wet, dark sleeve.

There, stark against his pale skin, were jagged, circular burn scars—shaped precisely like the rim of a scalding kitchen pot, or better yet, the metal edge of a boiling kettle used during a struggle.

Audrey buried her face in my shoulder, trembling.

Dominic’s expression didn't grow angry. It didn't twist with rage. Instead, his face went completely, terrifyingly blank. The terrifying calm of a storm before a nuclear blast.

"Take him down to the basement," Dominic whispered to his lead enforcer, Viktor. "And don't kill him yet. I want to ask him how he liked the fire."

As two massive guards grabbed Marcus, dragging him screaming toward the service elevators while patrons looked away in horror, Dominic slowly turned his piercing gaze back to me.

He looked down at Audrey, who was still clutching my sleeve, and then up into my eyes.

"You," Dominic said, stepping closer. "What is your name?"

"Claire," I answered, my voice steady despite the adrenaline roaring in my veins.

Dominic’s eyes flicked over my cheap restaurant uniform, lingering for a fraction of a second on the way I held myself—not like a frightened waitress, but with the posture of someone who had spent a lifetime hiding in plain sight.

"Claire what?"

"Just Claire," I lied.

Because if Dominic Vale ever found out that my real last name was Mercer—that my dying father had ordered me to flee Indiana and bury our family name because the Mercers and the Vales had been blood enemies in the Chicago underworld for three generations—he wouldn't just fire me.

He would put a bullet between my eyes right here on the spot.