Six months after a bullet paralyzed me, my fiancée canceled my therapy, sneering, “Helping him is pointless now.” She spent our money on wedding dresses while demanding my signature on our harbor properties. But my $25-an-hour nurse refused to let me rot. She rebooked my session and secretly placed a folded document on my hospital bed: “Mr. Corvino… your fiancée doesn’t want you to walk again.” Reading Arya’s signature at the bottom, I realized the bullet wasn’t an accident—it was an inside job Kertati

Footsteps echoed down the long marble gallery. Heavy, confident, accompanied by the distinct, expensive fragrance of cedarwood and Turkish tobacco.

Dominic walked into the drawing room.

He was wearing his charcoal three-piece suit, his silk tie loosened just enough to signal an executive who had spent the day carrying the weight of an empire. He looked down at me, and for the briefest instant, I saw the flicker of calculated pity—the rehearsed expression of an undertaker arriving to measure the parlor for a coffin.

“Vince,” he said, stepping forward to clasp my shoulder. His palm was warm, heavy, possessive. “How are we doing today, cousin?”

“I’m cold, Dom,” I said, letting my head tilt slightly to the left, allowing my speech to drag just enough to feed his appetite. “The radiators in this wing are clanking again.”

Dominic smiled—a small, patronizing curl of his mouth. “I’ll have the maintenance boys look at the boiler tomorrow. Look, I don’t want to exhaust you, but we’ve got a critical tax deadline on Pier Nineteen. The city is threatening to revoke our deep-water dredging permit unless we transfer the parcel into an active development trust.”

He reached into his leather portfolio and pulled out a blue-backed legal document, laying it across my blanketed knees alongside an open gold pen.