After 12 years trapped in a wheelchair, the Mafia Boss thought betrayal couldn’t hurt more—until he caught his fiancée secretly injecting him… but why did the maid’s little daughter make him stand at midnight?

The sun had barely crested the eastern ridge of the Chicago skyline when Tommy Reyes slipped through the gap in the privet hedge.

He wasn't carrying a baseball bat today. Instead, he carried a small, battered black backpack containing a discarded laptop he had scavenged from an electronics recycling bin in the alley behind his mother's apartment, along with a tangle of ethernet cables and a screwdriver he had stolen from his uncle's garage.

He found Luca sitting alone on the back porch, staring out over the misty lawn toward the baseball diamond.

"Morning," Tommy said, dropping his backpack onto the wooden planks with a heavy thud.

Luca looked down at the boy. The dark circles under Luca’s eyes spoke of a night without sleep, but there was a new, dangerous clarity in his posture.

"You're early," Luca said.

"I didn't sleep much," Tommy replied, sitting cross-legged on the top step. "My mom was crying in the kitchen until three in the morning. She said some woman named Valerie was screaming in the courtyard before the guards took her away in a black van."

"Valerie is no longer a concern," Luca said evenly.

"Yeah, well, her security clearance is still active on the house server," Tommy said, unzipping his backpack and pulling out the battered laptop. "My uncle used to show me how security networks work before he... you know, before he had to leave town in a hurry."

Luca’s eyebrow arched slightly. "You know how to hack a high-end biometric security grid?"

"I know how to guess passwords that rich people use when they think nobody is smart enough to check," Tommy corrected him with a cheeky grin. "Like naming your master override code after your pet dog or your summer estate in Capri."

He slammed the laptop open, tapped a few keys, and spun the screen around toward Luca.

Lines of green code scrolled across the cracked monitor, reflecting in the glass of Luca’s eyes.

"Look at this file," Tommy said, pointing a grubby finger at a time-stamped log. "This is the server log for the east wing medical dispensary. Every time Valerie injected you, she didn't just walk in with a syringe. She logged into the smart-dispenser using her administrative keycard to check out the neurotoxin compounds from the restricted pharmaceutical safe."

Luca leaned forward, reading the digital trail. Every date, every dosage, every batch number matched the Johns Hopkins toxicity report with terrifying precision.

"She didn't act alone," Luca murmured, his voice dropping an octave. "A smart-dispenser of that caliber requires a dual-authorization code. My private key was disabled the night I was poisoned."

"Bingo," Tommy said, tapping another key. "She had a partner. Someone with executive override access. Look at the secondary authorization signature."

The screen blinked, loading a corporate seal from Vanguard Shipping & Logistics—the primary subsidiary of the Costello empire, currently managed by none other than Marcus Vance, Valerie’s older brother and the senior executive vice president of the board.

The puzzle pieces clicked into place with the chilling finality of a guillotine blade dropping.

They hadn't just wanted to keep him in a wheelchair. They had wanted to turn him into a vegetable, quietly liquidate his shipping ports, and hand the entire Chicago syndicate over to the Vance family.

"You're pretty good with that machine, kid," Luca said, resting a heavy hand on Tommy's shoulder.

"I'm going to be an engineer," Tommy said proudly. "Or a mob boss. I haven't decided yet. Both require good problem-solving skills."

Luca let out a rare, genuine chuckle—the first real sound of amusement that had escaped his lips in a decade.

"Stick to engineering," Luca advised. "The hours are better, and the retirement plan doesn't involve federal prison."

As Tommy packed his laptop back into his backpack, Luca looked across the lawn toward the spot where Maya was already skipping near the edge of the diamond, waiting for the morning air to clear so she could start her daily dance routine.

"Tommy," Luca said quietly.

"Yeah?"

"Tell your mother... tell Elena that I want her and the girls inside the main house by tonight. No more living in the guest cottage by the laundry rooms."