For one hour and twenty-seven minutes, a six-month-old baby screamed aboard a flight from New York to Los Angeles while his father, one of the most feared mafia bosses in America, struggl

Dante stared at my sleeping daughter’s empty seat through the curtain, then looked back at me with eyes as cold as the Atlantic.

“If your husband is just a controlling corporate auditor,” Dante said, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper, “why did my head of security just flag his name on a private flight manifest landing in Los Angeles an hour before we do?”

My blood ran completely cold.

Leo was finally asleep in my arms, his tiny chest rising and falling against mine, but my own breathing stopped.

“What?” I choked out, clutching the edge of the first-class blanket. “No. That’s impossible. Richard thinks I’m taking a Greyhound bus to Florida. I planted fake credit card charges. I left my phone in a diner in Columbus.”

Dante’s bodyguard, a mountain of a man with a jagged scar across his throat, stepped closer. He handed Dante a sleek tablet.

Dante turned the screen toward me.

There, highlighted in harsh yellow text on a flight tracker, was my husband’s name: Richard Jensen. The private jet was chartered by a shell company, scheduled to land at LAX at 4:15 AM. We were landing at 5:30 AM.

“He isn’t going to Florida, Clare,” Dante said quietly. “He’s going to California. Which means he knows exactly where you are.”

Panic seized my chest so violently I felt dizzy. I looked down at Leo, instinctively pulling the baby closer to my chest.

“My cousin,” I whispered, tears welling in my eyes. “My cousin in Los Angeles... David. He bought my ticket. He’s the only one who knew I was coming.”

Dante’s jaw tightened. He looked at his bodyguard. “Silas. Run David Miller.”

Silas typed rapidly on his phone. The cabin around us was completely silent, the other first-class passengers asleep in their pods. The hum of the jet engines felt like a countdown clock.

Ten seconds later, Silas looked up. His expression was grim.

“David Miller filed for bankruptcy six months ago,” Silas said in a gravelly voice. “Two days ago, his mortgage was paid off in full. The wire transfer came from an account linked to the Moretti syndicate in New York.”

My stomach bottomed out.

David had sold me out. My own flesh and blood. He had bought my ticket just to hand me over to Richard. I was flying my three-year-old daughter directly into a trap.

“I have to get off this plane,” I gasped, blindly trying to stand up. “I have to get Maya. We have to hide.”

“Sit down,” Dante ordered. It wasn’t a request. It was the command of a man who controlled empires.

“You don’t understand!” I pleaded, tears spilling down my cheeks. “Richard isn’t just controlling. He hurts me. He locks me in rooms. If he takes Maya—”

“Clare. Look at me.”

Dante leaned forward. The exhaustion in his face had vanished, replaced by a terrifying, absolute authority.

“Do you know who the Moretti syndicate is?” Dante asked.

I shook my head, trembling violently.

“They are my rivals,” Dante said smoothly. “They are the people who planted the bomb under my wife’s car six months ago. And if your husband is transferring money for them, he isn’t a corporate auditor. He’s a mafia cleaner.”

I stared at him. The air was sucked out of my lungs.

Richard’s late-night phone calls. The burner phones I found in his jacket. The way the local police chief always looked the other way when my neighbors called about the screaming. It all suddenly made horrifying sense.

Before I could process it, a sound pierced the quiet hum of the cabin.

A child’s scream.

It was coming from premium economy.

“Maya,” I gasped, shoving the blankets aside. I handed Leo to Dante and sprinted through the curtain, my heart hammering against my ribs.

I tore down the narrow aisle, pushing past a startled flight attendant.

When I reached row 12, my daughter was awake. But she wasn’t alone.

A man in a gray suit was kneeling beside her seat, holding Maya by her small wrist. Maya was crying, clutching her stuffed rabbit tightly to her chest.

“Let go of her!” I screamed, throwing myself between them.

I shoved the man hard in the chest. He stumbled back into the aisle. I scooped Maya into my arms, burying her face in my shoulder. She was shaking like a leaf.

“Mommy,” she sobbed. “He woke me up.”

The man in the suit recovered his balance. He didn’t look like a flight attendant. He had dead, empty eyes.

“I was just checking on the little girl,” the man said smoothly, adjusting his tie. “She was having a nightmare.”

“You were grabbing her wrist,” I hissed, stepping backward.

“She dropped something,” the man said.

He held out his hand.

Resting in his palm was a silver locket.

I froze. It was my mother’s locket. I had pawned it three years ago to pay for Maya’s emergency room visit when Richard refused to give me money. I had cried for weeks over losing it.

“Your husband wanted you to have this back, Clare,” the man whispered, his voice barely audible over the engine noise. “He said to tell you he’ll be waiting at the baggage claim.”

A heavy hand clamped down on the man’s shoulder.

Silas materialized behind him like a shadow. Before the man could react, Silas shoved him against the bulkhead, pinning him by the throat.

Dante stepped out from the first-class curtain, holding his sleeping son. He looked at the man in the gray suit, then at the locket.

“Tell the pilot we aren’t going to the terminal,” Dante said coldly. “We’re pulling into my private hangar.”