I’ve been called a lot of things—billionaire, kingmaker, criminal. The truth is less glamorous and far more dangerous. I run an empire built on two pillars: money and fear. Money buys silence. Fear keeps it.

On paper, I’m a legitimate businessman with global holdings in shipping, tech, and luxury real estate. That’s the image I let the press feed on. What they don’t know is that half my wealth was built in rooms where contracts were written in blood, where men shook my hand knowing they might not see another sunrise if they crossed me.

She doesn’t know that part.

Or maybe she does, in that instinctive way sweet things sense the wolf at the edge of the woods. She’s twenty-four—half my life and all of my heart. My wife. Technically, my ex-wife now. She walked out two weeks ago with a suitcase and trembling hands, muttering something about me not caring for her. As if that could ever be true.

But I didn’t fight her that night. Let her think she’d won. Sometimes you have to let the prey believe they’ve escaped before you reel them back in.

Tonight is that night.

I’m in my study, glass of Macallan in hand, when I give the order. My men are the kind you never see coming. Three of them, black-clad, gloved. They’ll slip into her apartment without leaving a footprint. They won’t hurt her—God help them if they do—but they’ll make sure she’s afraid enough to remember exactly what kind of world she lives in without me.

She’s innocent. Too innocent. She thinks evil is something that lives in headlines, not in the man who used to tuck her against his chest at night. That’s the problem—she doesn’t understand that my darkness is the only thing keeping worse monsters away from her.

I imagine the moment the lock turns, the shuffle of boots on her hardwood floor. The way her breath will catch, heart racing as her mind runs through every horror it’s ever absorbed from the news. I picture her fumbling for her phone with trembling fingers. I’ve conditioned her well—when she’s in danger, I’m the first name she thinks of.

It’s less than thirty minutes before my phone rings. Not a text. A call. Her voice is wrecked, trembling. “Can I—are you home?”

“Always.”

I’m in the foyer when my driver pulls up with her. She doesn’t knock. Just bursts through the door, and before I can say a word, she’s on me—shaking, crying, clinging like I’m the last thing tethering her to solid ground. I drop into the nearest chair with her in my lap, my arms caging her in, holding her small body against mine.

Her breath is shallow, almost panicked, as she hides her face in my neck. “Someone was in my apartment,” she chokes out. “I heard them. They—” She breaks off, a sob catching in her throat.

My hand moves slowly up and down her spine, steady, grounding. “You’re safe now.”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she whispers.

That’s the point, sweetheart.

“I’ve got you,” I murmur, pressing my mouth to her hair. She smells like vanilla and fear, and I inhale both like they’re oxygen. Her fingers fist in my shirt, clutching hard enough to crease the fabric.

I let her talk—about the noises, the shadows, the way she locked herself in the bathroom until she was sure they’d gone. Every word is another thread binding her tighter to me.

When her trembling eases, I tip her chin up. Her cheeks are damp, her eyes red. Still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. “You should have called me sooner,” I say softly, though the steel is there beneath it. “You know I’d get to you in minutes.”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Bother me?” I huff a quiet, humorless laugh. “There’s nothing in this world more important than you.”