You’ll only embarrass me wearing that dress.

The silence in the grand suite was suffocating, broken only by the horrific absence of Ethan’s breath.

His head lay heavy against Phoebe’s thighs. His skin, once radiant with unyielding authority, had turned the color of damp ash. The pulse point beneath his jaw—the pulse she had felt hammer with fierce possessiveness whenever he pulled her against him—was completely still.

"Ethan!" Phoebe’s scream did not sound human. It was the raw, primal sound of a lioness seeing her mate brought low by an invisible spear.

Around her, the room was falling into total chaos. The broken transceiver on the marble console was still emitting a low, electric hum, while on the discarded smartphone screen, the dark image of Victoria Vance’s taunting smile seemed burned into the retina of her memory. Twenty minutes. A twenty-minute countdown to deliver the Vance-Harrell master ledger, while Victoria held Raymond Harrell battered in a sub-basement five thousand miles away in Rhode Island.

"He’s in respiratory arrest!" Julian, Ethan’s head of private security, crashed through the French doors, gun drawn, his eyes widening in terror at the sight of his master collapsed on the floor. "The medics are held up at the courtyard gates—the estate’s automated defense grid was hacked! The perimeter is locked down!"

"Get the emergency field kit from his inner pocket!" Phoebe commanded, her voice dropping into a register of icy, terrifying clarity. The panic that had threatened to drown her vanished, replaced by the sheer, unadulterated fury that had allowed her to survive the Harrell family’s worst betrayals. "Julian! Move!"

Julian lunged forward, ripping open Ethan’s bespoke silk vest. From an interior tactical pocket reinforced with Kevlar, he pulled a sleek, titanium auto-injector—the Vance family’s proprietary emergency atropine-epinephrine composite, designed for battlefield survivability.

Phoebe didn't hesitate. She snatched the injector, ripped off the safety cap with her teeth, and slammed it directly through Ethan’s shirt into his chest muscle, driving the steel needle home until the pneumatic cylinder hissed and clicked empty.

Nothing happened.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

"Ethan, look at me," Phoebe whispered, her fingers burying into his dark hair, pulling his face upward. She leaned over him, her lips pressing against his cold mouth, forcing air straight into his lungs. "You don't get to die here. You swore you would burn the world down before anyone touched me. You promised me blood for blood. Wake up!"

She slammed both palms down onto the center of his sternum, delivering a brutal precordial thump.

*Crack.*

The sound echoed through the high-vaulted ceiling.

Suddenly, Ethan’s chest heaved violently. A jagged, agonized gasp tore from his throat. His spine arched off the polished marble as oxygen violently flooded his starving lungs. His bloodshot eyes snapped open, wild and disoriented, flashing with instinctual predatory lethalness. His hands shot up, fingers clamping like steel vices around Phoebe’s wrists before his vision focused.

"Phoebe..." he choked out, his vocal cords shredded from the neurotoxin’s paralytic grip. Blood trickled from the corner of his lip, staining the ivory collar of his shirt.

"I’m here. Don’t move," she said, leaning down until her forehead rested against his. Tears finally broke from her lashes, hot and scalding against his chilled cheek. "You stopped breathing."

Ethan blinked, the haze of near-death clearing behind eyes of cold, obsidian resolve. Even as his body trembled from the violent chemical shock of the adrenaline, the intellect that commanded global financial empires was already piecing together the broken pieces.

"My mother..." he rasped, his voice a jagged whisper. "The feed..."

"She’s alive, Ethan," Phoebe said, her voice steadying into an immovable pillar. "Victoria Vance faked her death twenty years ago. She has my father in the Rhode Island vault. She wants the Master Ledger. And she gave me twenty minutes."

Ethan struggled to sit up, brushing Julian’s helping hand aside with an imperious flick of his wrist. He braced himself against the foot of the mahogany bed, coughing up a mouthful of dark, clotted blood onto the white silk duvet.

"She didn’t fake her death to hide," Ethan said, his breathing shallow, every word an agonizing effort. "She faked it to divest herself of international oversight. She built the Syndicate using Vance shell corporations... while letting Eleanor Harrell take the fall as the face of the corruption."

"And your father?" Phoebe asked, remembering the old stories of the Vance patriarch who died of 'grief' shortly after Victoria’s supposed crash.

"She murdered him," Ethan said, a chilling stillness entering his eyes. "He found out she was laundering blood money through pharmaceutical conglomerates. That plane crash in the Alps... he was supposed to be on it. When he missed the flight, she poisoned his nightcap three months later. I was eight years old, Phoebe. I always knew there was a poisoner in the house. I just didn't know the ghost was still walking the earth."

Julian checked his tactical watch, his face pale beneath the moonlight pouring through the balcony. "Ma’am... Mr. Vance... we have fourteen minutes left on her ultimatum. The Master Ledger is encrypted in the private server of Apex Tower in Manhattan. Even with satellite uplinks, Rhode Island is beyond our immediate strike range. If we don’t transmit the ledger codes to her terminal in fourteen minutes, she’ll execute Raymond Harrell."

Ethan leaned against Phoebe, using her strength to haul himself upright onto his feet. His knees buckled slightly, but his gaze never wavered.

"She won't kill Raymond in fourteen minutes," Ethan said coldly, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of his hand. "Victoria is a sadist, but above all, she is an accountant. Raymond Harrell holds the physical biometric cipher to the Harrell trust funds. If she kills him before the transfer completes, sixty billion dollars vaporizes into the Federal Reserve’s sovereign escrow."

Phoebe looked down at the shattered phone, then at Ethan. "Then the countdown is a diversion."

"It’s not just a diversion," Ethan replied, stepping toward the console, his strength returning in a terrifying, adrenaline-fueled wave. "It’s an ambush. She wants you desperate. She wants you to transmit the ledger blindly so she can siphon the digital keys while we panic. But Victoria made one fatal calculation."

"What?" Phoebe asked.

Ethan turned to her, his dark eyes ablaze with an unholy fire. "She forgot that before she abandoned me, she taught me how she thinks. Julian, prep the Gulfstream. We aren't transmitting a single byte of data to Rhode Island."

"What are we doing, Mr. Vance?" Julian asked.

Ethan looked at Phoebe, his hand reaching out to touch the side of her neck, feeling the rapid, fierce pulse of the woman who had just dragged him back from the grave.