Chapter 3

Seven years of intimacy meant nothing beside Isabella's belongings.

The combat knife was already at my throat. Its edge sliced through a lock of hair across my forehead.

To keep it away from my carotid artery, I neither screamed nor waited to die. I had no choice but to dodge right.

I raised the right hand that had saved countless lives and clamped my palm around the blade.

Blood streamed between my fingers and soaked the front of my white dress, but I did not so much as flinch.

Seizing the opening, I snatched a shard of glass from the floor and plunged it into the attacker's neck with all my strength.

The gunfire beyond the room fell silent. Moretti reinforcements had arrived and quickly eliminated the remaining attackers.

Still visibly shaken, Victor emerged from the hidden room clutching Isabella's portrait and belongings to his chest.

Dust covered his suit, but he had kept the blonde woman in the painting pristine.

"Elena..." Victor's voice died as his gaze fell to my right hand.

The hand that had once been steady as stone, capable of removing the most dangerous lesions, now hung with its flesh split open and finger bones exposed. Blood struck the floor in heavy drops.

It was the same hand that had pulled him back from agony countless times.

There was not a trace of guilt in Victor's eyes for abandoning me to the blade, only the fury of a man whose property had been damaged. "Have you lost your mind? Who gave you permission to ruin that hand?

"Medical team! Lock down every hospital in Manhattan and drag the finest neurosurgeons here, even if you have to tie them up!"

"Don't touch me with your filthy hands." I leaned against the bloodstained ruins, my voice icy.

Victor's outstretched hand froze in midair. "Now that your hand is ruined, you can finally give up any fantasy of returning to medicine.

"Play her properly, and you will remain my one and only Donna. Even if you're crippled, I'll provide for you for the rest of your life."

"You'll provide for me?" I laughed bitterly.

I raised my uninjured left hand to the mangled ring finger of my right. Without expression, I pulled off the blood-soaked, fifty-million-dollar diamond ring and tossed it into the filthy pool of blood beside me.

"Seven years ago, you shielded me from falling debris. I owed you my life."

Using the wall for support, I stood and looked at the Don half-kneeling on the floor as if he were a piece of rotting garbage.

"This ruined hand repays the life I owed you. From this moment on, we are even."

Behind me, he roared that he would break my legs and lock me in a basement for the rest of my life.

I did not look back. I raised my middle finger.

Half an hour later, Victor's men found only two things in a trash can beside the ground-floor fire escape:

A clump of roughly shorn platinum hair and a signed application to serve as a field doctor with an international relief organization.

By then, a UN relief plane bound for a Middle Eastern war zone was already climbing into the night sky.

My dark brown hair hacked short and uneven, I used my teeth to wrench open a bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured it without hesitation over the torn tendons of my mangled right hand.

Suddenly, alarms screamed through the cabin, followed by the captain's panicked voice over the intercom. "Warning. We have entered contested airspace. Rebel surface-to-air missile radar has locked onto us from below. Brace for a crash landing."

A missile struck one engine, pitching the cabin violently sideways. The plane plowed through half of a wall already shattered by shelling before finally grinding to a halt.

I grabbed a field trauma kit from the floor, kicked open the warped emergency door, and climbed out.

Outside, several rebels carrying assault rifles approached the wreckage, laughing.

The moment I rolled into the sand, a rifle barrel pressed against my head.

"Well, hello, pretty foreigner."