Chapter 2
The gunshot echoed through the house like a thunderclap.
I hit the floor beneath Dominic’s weight, his body covering mine completely.
For one terrifying second, neither of us moved.
Then I felt something warm soaking through his shirt onto my hands.
“Dominic?”
He didn’t answer.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway—his security team, finally reaching us.
Gunfire erupted again, closer this time, then silence.
“Clear!” someone shouted. “Shooter’s down!”
I pushed myself out from under Dominic, my hands already searching for the wound.
“Don’t move,” I said, my voice shaking. “Don’t you dare move.”
Blood spread across his left shoulder, dark and fast.
“Emily,” he said through gritted teeth, “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you idiot, you got shot.”
His security chief, a broad man named Rourke, burst through the door.
“Boss, we need to move him now.”
They got Dominic downstairs and into a car within minutes, a private doctor already waiting at a safehouse an hour away.
I sat beside him the entire drive, pressing a towel to his shoulder, refusing to let go of his hand.
“Why did you do that?” I asked quietly.
“Do what?”
“Step in front of me. You said this marriage meant nothing.”
He closed his eyes. “Ask me again when I’m not bleeding.”
The doctor removed the bullet two hours later.
Dominic slept through most of it, exhausted from blood loss, while I sat in the corner of the room, unable to look away from him.
Rourke found me there near dawn.
“Mrs. Moretti,” he said carefully, “we need to talk about who did this.”
I straightened. “You don’t know?”
“We know the shooter was hired,” Rourke said. “Professional. Someone paid a lot of money to get him onto that property.”
My stomach dropped. “The accountant. The flash drive.”
Rourke’s expression tightened. “That’s what we’re looking into.”
“Someone wanted me dead because of what I saw,” I said slowly. “Not because of Dominic.”
“Maybe both,” Rourke said. “Maybe someone wants you gone and wants to send Dominic a message at the same time.”
I thought of the diamond ring on my finger, of Dominic’s cold words on our wedding night.
“He said I was protected,” I whispered. “He said nobody touches his wife.”
“They just did,” Rourke said grimly.
When Dominic woke that afternoon, his first word wasn’t a complaint about pain.
It was my name.
“Emily.”
“I’m here.”
He tried to sit up, wincing. “Are you hurt?”
“You threw yourself in front of a bullet for me, and you’re asking if I’m hurt?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Because of you.”
He studied me for a long moment, something unreadable in his eyes.
“I meant what I said,” he murmured. “About the marriage.”
My chest tightened. “I know.”
“But watching that gun point at you,” he said, voice rough, “I didn’t think twice.”
Neither of us said anything else.
Rourke knocked softly on the door. “Boss. We found something. You’re going to want to see this.”
Dominic’s expression hardened instantly, the wounded husband disappearing behind the crime boss again.
“Show me,” he said.
Rourke stepped inside, holding out a phone.
“The shooter had this on him,” he said. “A photo. And it’s not of you, Mrs. Moretti.”
He turned the screen toward us.
It was a photo of Dominic’s younger brother, Marco—taken from inside the Moretti estate, somewhere no outsider should have access.
