2.
Chicago changed the second Kane Romano came back from the dead.
Territory lines shifted.
Whispers rose.
Every gang in the city seemed to breathe the same rumor:
Kane isn’t dead.
And he has a weakness.
A girl.
Mia Hart.
She felt the danger before she saw it—
a pressure in the air, a heaviness behind her every step.
Hospitals were supposed to be safe, but even there she sensed eyes watching, waiting.
Kane sensed it too.
He refused to leave her side.
Refused to give her more than a few feet of distance.
Refused to pretend she wasn’t the only thing keeping him anchored.
And the way he looked at her now…
God.
Three years ago, Kane’s stare was a promise.
Now it was a warning—cold, sharp, devastatingly possessive.
A man who’d come back from hell with one instinct left:
Keep her.
Even if he had to break the world to do it.
It started on a Wednesday night.
A normal shift.
Normal patients.
Normal tired ache in her bones.
And then—
the hallway lights flickered.
Mia’s pulse kicked.
“Kane?” she whispered, glancing over her shoulder.
He was there instantly, like he’d been waiting for an excuse to close the space between them.
His hand cupped her jaw; his eyes cut through the dim glow like blades.
“Stay behind me.”
The command scraped down her spine.
Before she could ask what he saw, a figure lunged from the corner of the hallway—
a cloth, a grabbing hand, the sound of boots pounding the tile.
Mia barely had time to gasp.
Kane moved faster than the air around him.
He shoved her back, taking the hit himself, and slammed the attacker into the wall so hard the plaster cracked.
Another man came from behind—Kane twisted, blocked the strike, and drove an elbow into the attacker’s throat.
Mia pressed a hand over her mouth, watching violence unfold like a nightmare.
This wasn’t street fighting.
This wasn’t panic.
This was precision.
Deadly.
Terrifyingly controlled.
Except Kane wasn’t controlled.
Not anymore.
When one of the men grabbed Mia’s wrist, dragging her toward the stairwell, Kane snapped.
The look on his face…
it wasn’t just anger.
It was obliteration.
He ripped the man off her, threw him to the ground, and hit him again—
and again—
and again—
until blood splattered across the linoleum tiles.
“Kane!” Mia cried, voice shaking. “Stop—he’s down, he’s—Kane!”
He froze only when she touched his arm.
Only when her fingers circled his wrist.
Only when her voice cut through the chaos bleeding out of him.
His breathing was a ragged storm.
He looked at her like he didn’t remember where he was—
only why he was fighting.
For her.
Always for her.
“Mia…” His voice cracked, still trembling with rage. “They touched you.”
She swallowed hard, trying to calm the trembling in her own hands.
She should’ve been terrified.
And she was.
But not of him.
Never of him.
She was terrified of losing him.
Of watching him get swallowed whole by the very world he tried to keep her out of.
Slowly, she cupped his jaw, ignoring the blood smeared across his cheek.
“Kane,” she whispered, “I’m okay.”
His eyes softened—barely, but enough to shatter her all over again.
“You’re not,” he rasped. “They would’ve taken you. They wanted to use you to get to me.”
She sucked in a sharp breath.
So she really was his weakness.
The rumor wasn’t wrong.
But the truth hit her with even more force:
Kane was hers too.
And that was the real danger.
Because even as her heart pounded, even as adrenaline shook her body, even as she watched the man she once loved transform into something dark and violent—
Her fingers curled tighter around him.
She wasn’t afraid of his darkness.
She was afraid of a world where he wasn’t in it.
This—
this protective fury, this unhinged desperation—
wasn’t something she could walk away from.
Kane Romano was the storm that ruined her life.
And somehow, heartbreakingly, impossibly—
he was still the only place she felt safe.