I pulled a dying man from a flaming car crash, completely unaware I had just saved the most dangerous crime lord in the city.

I went rigid. "How do you know that?"

"You live in a second-floor apartment on Oak Street," Dominic said smoothly, setting his fork down with a light clatter. "Your six-year-old daughter, Lily, goes to St. Jude’s Elementary. She wears a yellow raincoat with a torn hood. You owe twelve hundred dollars in medical bills from her asthma attack in November, and you work seventy hours a week between this diner and a dry-cleaning shop on 4th Avenue."

A cold sweat broke out across my back. The fluorescent lights overhead suddenly felt too bright, cutting through my vision like knives.

"You had me followed," I said, my voice trembling with a mixture of terror and anger.

"I had you investigated," Dominic corrected calmly. "There is a difference. When a woman drags the head of the Salvatore family out of a burning sedan while six rival hitmen are standing fifty yards away with automatic rifles, I need to know if she was a guardian angel or a plant."

"I was taking out the trash," I snapped. "I saw a car on fire. I didn't care who was inside."

"And that is why you are still breathing, Emma," Dominic leaned forward, placing his long, scarred hands flat on the Formica table. "Because my men spent three weeks digging through your life and found nothing but an honest woman trying to keep her child alive in a city that wants to swallow her whole."

"I don't want your money," I whispered, glancing nervously back toward Rosie, who was pretending to wipe the coffee machine while her eyes stayed glued to our booth.

"I didn't offer you money," Dominic said. "Money is easy. Money buys cars, houses, and politicians. What I am offering you is survival."

"Survival from what? I was doing fine before you walked through that door."

"You were drowning," Dominic said, his dark eyes locking onto mine with an unyielding intensity. "Your landlord is a associate of the Moretti family—the very men who bombed my sedan three weeks ago. He is raising your rent because he wants to push you out to turn the building into a distribution hub. By tomorrow morning, he will know that the woman who pulled Dominic Salvatore from the wreckage lives in apartment 2B."