I stared blindly at it. “Give me another one,” I demanded, my chest heaving. “One doesn’t do a damn thing. Give me two.”
Emma glanced at the label on the bottle, then shook her head, slipping the medication into her apron pocket. “It says one every six hours. You’re shaking, and you look like you’re going to pass out. You haven’t eaten today, have you? Two of these on an empty stomach will put you in a coma.”
I forced my head up, glaring at her through the haze of agony. “I run half this city. I give the orders. Give me the pill.”
“You can run the city tomorrow,” she replied evenly, holding the glass of water to my lips until I had no choice but to swallow the single painkiller. “Tonight, you take one pill and you survive. I’m not cleaning up your corpse on my shift. It’s above my pay grade.”
I stared at her, breathless. No one—absolutely no one—had refused me anything in years. Yet here was this exhausted, underpaid maid, standing in my study, calmly rationing my narcotics and deciding my fate. And the most terrifying part was… I let her.
Over the next few weeks, something fundamental shifted inside me. I couldn’t stop watching her. When the house was quiet, I found myself pulling up the security camera feeds on my monitors, my eyes tracking her movements through the sprawling estate. I transitioned from a hostile employer to a silent, obsessive observer.
I began to notice the heartbreaking details. I saw the dark, bruised circles under her eyes that no amount of cheap makeup could hide. I watched the way her slender hands shook as she hauled impossibly heavy laundry bags down the service stairs. I saw how she would lean heavily against the hallway walls, closing her eyes in sheer exhaustion, only when she thought the cameras weren’t pointing her way. She was carrying a weight that was crushing her, and for the first time since my injury, I found myself caring about someone else’s pain. The tension between us had shifted from hostility to a dangerous, unspoken curiosity.
I had spent my entire life neutralizing threats I could see coming. I could spot a traitor from a mile away; I could anticipate a rival family’s ambush before they even planned it. But I was entirely, fundamentally unprepared for the night I woke suddenly in my dark bedroom, the air chilled by the air conditioning. My instincts kicked in before my brain did. My hand instantly slipped beneath my pillow, my fingers wrapping tightly around the cold, familiar grip of my Glock 19. I drew the weapon, holding my breath in the darkness, ready to fire at the assassin who had somehow bypassed a million-dollar security system.
But I froze, my finger hovering millimeters from the trigger, when I realized the soft, rhythmic breathing I heard wasn’t a killer’s. And the sudden, shocking warmth pressed against my paralyzed left side belonged to a body curled into a tight ball on the very edge of my mattress.
