SHE CONFRONTED HIM IN BUNNY SLIPPERS… NOW THE MAFIA BOSS IS OBSESSED

Thump.

The ceiling trembled above my bed like someone was pacing in combat boots across my skull.

I opened one bloodshot eye and stared at the red digits on my nightstand.

3:12 a.m.

Perfect.

Wonderful.

Absolutely murder-inspiring.

For sixteen hours, I had been bent over a seventeenth-century oil painting at Rossi Gallery, breathing through a mask while I tried to match a patch of cerulean blue sky no bigger than my thumbnail. My fingers smelled of solvent and old varnish. My back ached like someone had replaced my spine with rusted wire. All I wanted was five hours of sleep before going back to rescue history from rich people who thought “restoration” meant “make it look new.”

Instead, the giant in penthouse A had chosen violence.

For three weeks, he had paced above me like a caged tiger with unresolved childhood trauma and concrete shoes. I had filed complaints. I had emailed the leasing office. I had taped a polite note to the lobby board.

Nothing worked.

Diplomacy died at 3:13.

I threw off the duvet, shoved my feet into fuzzy pink bunny slippers, grabbed my robe, and stalked toward the elevator with the cold, focused rage of a woman who had been denied sleep too many nights in a row.

The hallway smelled of floor wax and burnt popcorn. The elevator groaned upward. When the doors opened on the top floor, there was no hallway. There was a foyer pretending to be a military checkpoint.

Two men in black suits stood outside mahogany double doors.

Massive men.

Not gym-bro massive.

Lab-created, professionally intimidating massive.

One lifted a hand the size of a dinner plate.

“Miss, you can’t be up here.”

“I live in 4B,” I snapped, ducking under his arm. “And I’m about to have a conversation with your boss before I lose my mind.”

“Ma’am—”

I ignored him and pounded on the doors.

“Open up!” I shouted. “I know you’re in there. I can hear you stomping around like Godzilla with a grudge.”

Hands clamped on my shoulders.

Then the lock clicked.

The guards released me so fast you would have thought I had become radioactive.

The doors opened.

Every speech I had prepared died in my throat.

The man standing there was terrifying.

Tall did not describe him. Tall was for basketball players and inconvenient shelves. This man loomed. He filled the doorway with broad shoulders, a half-open white shirt, and black tattoos crawling over his chest and up his throat like smoke. His dark hair was chaotic, as if he had spent hours dragging his hands through it. His eyes were worse—black, calm, predatory, empty of everything except sharp attention.

I should have run.

Instead, exhaustion looked my survival instinct in the face and told it to sit down.

“You,” I said.

His gaze dropped to my slippers, then to the paint smear on my chin, then back to my face.

“Silence,” he said.

“Exactly,” I snapped. “That is what I want. Silence. Stop pacing. Stop stomping. Stop dropping furniture or bodies or whatever you do up here at three in the morning. I work for a living. I restore art. If my hand shakes because I’m tired, I ruin a priceless painting, and then history dies because you can’t sit still.”

One guard made a strangled sound.

The man raised one hand.

The guard went silent.

For a long second, he studied me as if I were a forgery he had not decided whether to burn.

Then he reached into his pocket.

I stepped back.

Silver flashed.

Not a gun.

A money clip.

He peeled off a stack of hundred-dollar bills and held it out.

“Buy earplugs,” he said.

Heat climbed my neck.

No apology. No promise. Just cash. I was another problem he thought he could pay to disappear.

I snatched the money from his hand.

Satisfaction flickered in his eyes.

Then I opened my fingers.

The bills drifted down like expensive confetti, scattering across the marble around his bare feet.

“I don’t want your money,” I said, my voice shaking just enough to make me furious. “I want you to be a decent neighbor.”

Silence crashed over the foyer.

The boredom vanished from his face.

His eyes sharpened.

I turned and marched back to the elevator before my knees could remember fear. The guards moved out of my way like I was carrying explosives. As the doors slid shut, I looked back once.

The man still stood in his doorway, surrounded by the money I had thrown at his feet.

He was not looking at the cash.

He was looking at me.