She Missed Work Without A Word—The Mafia Boss Found Her Broken On The Floor At Home

The rain had been falling since noon and showed no intention of stopping. Rhett Valon stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his forty-third-floor penthouse office and watched the Chicago skyline dissolve into a smear of cold, metallic gray.

His encrypted phone had rung eleven times in the last hour. He hadn't answered once.

It was 3:17 in the afternoon, and Isa Voss had not come to work.

That had never happened before. Not once in three years.

Rhett was not a man who noticed the presence of people around him. He moved through rooms, and other people adjusted. But he had noticed Isa—not in the way he noticed beautiful women, though she was—but in the way a commander notices a system running with lethal efficiency. You only become aware of it when it stops.

She arrived every morning at 7:00. He knew this because his dark roast coffee was always sitting on his desk by 7:15, at precisely 175 degrees, with a folded copy of the Wall Street Journal beside it, even though he had never asked for a newspaper.

She left every evening at 5:00.

For three years, this had been the rhythm that anchored his brutal world. Until today.

He turned slowly from the dark glass.

"Marcus," he said into the intercom on his mahogany desk. "Pull Isa Voss's home address from HR."

"Already pulled it, sir," Marcus's dry voice came back instantly. "I anticipated."

"Text it to my personal line. And cancel everything for the rest of the day."

"Everything, sir? The Commission meeting at four—"

"Everything."

Rhett was already reaching for his charcoal wool coat before the intercom went silent.

The address was a run-down walk-up in Pilsen. Three stories of weathered red brick that had been old when the neighborhood was still working-class, and it hadn't improved with time.

Rhett stood on the wet sidewalk for a moment, his Italian leather shoes absorbing the cold mist. He had come alone, a decision his security detail had nearly drawn weapons to prevent. He didn't care.

He pressed the buzzer for apartment 2B. Nothing. He pressed it again, holding his thumb flat against the plastic for three full seconds. Nothing.

The front door had a standard residential lock. Rhett slid a thin steel bypass card from his inner jacket pocket and worked the latch with practiced, criminal efficiency.

The lobby smelled like damp carpet, cheap cleaning solvents, and stale cigarettes. He took the stairs two at a time.

Second floor. The flickering hallway light hummed weakly. Apartment 2B sat at the far end of the corridor.

He raised his hand to knock, but his knuckles froze an inch from the wood.

The door was open. Not wide open—just a crack, barely two inches. The latch was unseated.

In Rhett's world, a door that should be closed and wasn't was never a neutral observation.

His right hand slid naturally inside his jacket, his fingers wrapping around the customized grip of his Sig Sauer. He pushed the heavy door open with two fingers and stepped into the dim apartment.

The space looked as though a bomb had detonated in the middle of it.

A side table lay on its back, its legs splintered. The glass lamp beside it was shattered, the bulb dark. A heavy oak bookshelf had been pulled from the plaster wall, dozens of paperbacks scattered across the floor like dead birds.

The small kitchen was visible from the entryway. A chair was overturned. A ceramic mug lay broken, dried coffee splattered in a sunburst pattern up the cabinet face—a pattern that told his trained eyes it had been thrown with violent force hours ago. A framed photograph of two women lay faceup on the floor, the glass spiderwebbed across their smiling faces.

Then there was the smell. He recognized it instantly and hated it. Iron and copper, and beneath that, something raw and biological that he associated with moments in his past he never permitted himself to revisit.

Blood.

It wasn't on the living room floor. His gray eyes swept the area in a systematic, clinical grid, cataloging and eliminating.

Then he heard it. A faint, ragged sound from the dark hallway beyond the kitchen. A small, wet, terrible breathing sound.

Rhett moved past the broken mug, stepping over the glass without making a sound, and pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall.

The bedroom was in shadows.

Isa was on the floor beside the bed, wedged tightly into the narrow gap between the mattress frame and the nightstand, as if she had crawled there in the dark and simply run out of strength to go any further. She was still wearing her work clothes—dark slacks and a gray silk blouse. One shoe was still on her foot; the other was missing. Her face was turned away from him toward the wall, but he could see the rigid line of her shoulder and the shallow, agonizing rhythm of her chest.

He crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees beside her.

"Isa."

She flinched violently at her name. The violent tremor moved through her entire body, telling him two things simultaneously: she was conscious, and she was utterly terrified.

"It's me." He kept his deep voice low, even, and stripped of all command. "It's Rhett. You're okay. I'm not going to hurt you."

A long, painful pause followed. Then, inch by agonizing inch, she turned her head toward him.

Rhett had prepared himself for something bad. He was a man who lived in the dark underbelly of Chicago, a man who saw broken bodies every week.

He had not prepared himself for this.

Her left eye was swollen completely shut, the surrounding skin a hideous gradient of deep plum, black, and sickly yellow. Her lower lip was split wide open, dried rust-brown blood tracing a line down her chin to her collar. A dark, ugly contusion mapped the precise shape of a heavy fist along her jawline, and another set of bruises gripped her pale throat like a collar.

When his gaze descended, he saw that the sleeve of her gray silk blouse had been ripped violently from the shoulder seam.

Rhett had seen violence his entire adult life. He had inflicted it. He had ordered it executed on men who crossed his family's lines. He had watched enemies bled out in dark basements and felt nothing beyond a cold, mechanical assessment of whether the debt was settled.

Looking at Isa, his hands began to shake.

He slammed his palms flat against his dark trousers and forced his muscles to freeze.

"Can you move?" he asked.

When her voice came, it was a ruined rasps. "How did you..."

"You didn't come to work. Can you move, Isa?"

She tried to leverage herself up against the nightstand. The choked, strangled sound that tore from her chest made him reach out instantly to stop her.

He slid one heavy arm behind her shoulder blades and his other beneath her knees, lifting her with painstaking care, as if she were made of thin spun glass. She was far lighter than he had imagined. She was also trembling uncontrollably, fine, violent tremors running through her body like a live wire.

"I'm fine," she whispered into his shoulder.

It was the most absurd, dishonest statement he had ever heard in his life.

"No," Rhett said softly, setting her down on the edge of the mattress. "You're not."

He crouched in front of her, resting his hands lightly on her knees. He cataloged her injuries with clinical precision, but beneath the cold calculation, something primal was clawing its way up his throat. He saw the way she pressed her remaining shoe flat against the hardwood floor, desperately trying to anchor herself to the earth.

He saw that she wasn't crying, which meant she had already exhausted her tears long before he found her.

"Who did this to you?" he asked.

Isa turned her uninjured eye toward the rain-streaked window.

"Isa. Look at me."

"It doesn't matter, Rhett."

The temperature in the small bedroom dropped sharply. Rhett didn't raise his voice. Men of his status never needed to shout.

"Tell me who did this to you."

She made a wet, coughing sound that might have passed for a laugh in a different world. "You're going to do something terrible to him."

"Yes."

"That's why I'm not telling you."

Rhett leaned closer, studying her damaged face. What he saw in her single visible eye was not fear of him. It was something far more dangerous: a woman who had calculated the brutal consequences of his world and decided to protect him from them.

"Give me his name, Isa," Rhett said, his voice dropping into an icy register. "Or I spend the next six hours having my men tear this city apart until I find him myself. It makes no difference to me which path we take."

The silence in the room stretched thin. Outside, the rain hammered relentlessly against the glass.

"Cain," she finally whispered, her voice cracking on the hard consonant. "Tyler Cain. We were... we were together for eight months. It ended three weeks ago. He didn't take it well."

Rhett stood up slowly. He walked over to the bedroom window, turning his back to her while he stared down at the wet, narrow alley below.

He was analyzing his own physiological response, trying to master it, because mastering it was the only way to retain control. And control was the only barrier standing between him and committing an act of absolute slaughter.

He had never in his life felt a rage quite like this. It wasn't the clean, cold business of the Valon syndicate. It was personal.

He turned around.

"You're coming with me."

Isa blinked her swollen eye. "What?"

"You aren't staying here." He touched the torn silk of her sleeve with two fingers, his jaw tight. "Look at this place. You can't stay here."

"I have... my neighbor, Mrs. Gable—"

"You are coming with me, Isa," he repeated. It wasn't an invitation, and it wasn't quite an executive order. It was a statement of reality. "My compound has a full medical facility and a private physician. You need to be examined. After that, you can make whatever choices you want."

She stared at him for a long, heavy moment. He held her gaze effortlessly.

"I don't want your charity, Mr. Valon," she said, her tone suddenly laced with the quiet pride he had witnessed in the office for three years.

"It isn't charity," Rhett said, stepping toward her and extending his hand. "You are my chief executive assistant. You are damaged. This is logistics."