Dominic Russo thought he could humiliate a broke waitress in front of his men, but his smile disappeared the moment she replied in flawless Neapolitan.

Maya stared at him, bewildered. "Audit your life? What is that supposed to mean?"

"For twenty years, I’ve built an empire by keeping ledgers in my head," Dominic said, gesturing toward a massive mahogany desk that dominated the center of the room. Atop the desk sat not a computer terminal, but several thick, leather-bound accounting books bound in dark calfskin—physical ledgers that looked like relics from another century. "Every shipment, every payoff, every corporate merger, every alliance and betrayal. My men are good with guns, and my lawyers are good with loopholes. But nobody looks at the numbers the way an accountant does."

"I am a restaurant accountant, Mr. Russo," Maya said, her voice laced with skepticism. "I balance food costs, payroll, and liquor inventories. I don't audit transnational syndicates."

"Money is money, Maya," Dominic replied, stepping closer until she could see the fine texture of his tailored lapel and the faint, clean scent of sandalwood. "Numbers don't care whether they come from a crate of imported wine or a cargo container docked at Pier 14. They add up, or they don't. And lately... my books don't add up."

He walked over to the massive desk, opened the top leather ledger, and flipped the heavy pages until he stopped at a column filled with neat, handwritten entries in black ink.

"Julian wasn't just working with the feds," Dominic said, his voice dropping into a hard, cold register. "He was skimming. Small amounts, buried deep inside subsidiary logistics accounts. Barely noticeable if you're looking at the macro level. But when you trace the line items down to the individual cent..."

He looked up at her.

"...the math was sloppy."

Maya felt a strange, magnetic pull drawing her toward the desk. Her analytical mind—the part of her that had kept her sane through years of financial chaos—instinctively responded to the mention of an unbalanced ledger. She walked slowly across the marble floor, stopping beside the mahogany desk, and looked down at the pages.

The handwriting was neat, precise, but dense with corporate shell-company designations.

Without thinking, she reached out, picked up a silver fountain pen resting beside the ledger, and scanned the columns. Her eyes moved rapidly across the rows of figures, tracking subtotals, overhead percentages, and shipping tariffs.

"This isn't just a skim," Maya murmured, her professional instincts completely taking over. She forgot where she was. She forgot who was standing beside her. "Look at the tariff allocation on the third-quarter imports from Naples. The port fees don't match the volume of goods declared."

Dominic watched her, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face. "Go on."

"Whoever did this didn't just want extra cash," Maya said, her finger tracing a line of numbers down the page. "They were creating a paper trail designed to frame someone else in the inner circle. If the feds audited this specific subsidiary, the blame would fall squarely on Marcus, not Julian."

"Marcus is my head of security," Dominic noted quietly. "Julian wanted me to execute my most loyal man."

"Then your security isn't the only thing leaking," Maya said, looking up from the ledger to meet his dark gaze. "Your accounting department is full of amateurs."

The silence in the office stretched for several seconds. Dominic didn't look angry. Instead, the look in his eyes deepened into something that felt dangerously close to admiration.

"That’s why I brought you here," Dominic said softly. "You see what everyone else misses because you're looking at the truth instead of the shadow."

"This doesn't mean I work for you, Dominic," Maya said, setting the fountain pen down on the desk with a sharp click. "It means your bookkeeper is incompetent, and I have a professional habit of spotting bad math."

"Stay," Dominic said.

The word wasn't a question. It wasn't an order barked by a mob boss. It was a quiet, absolute proposition.

"Stay here, in this office. I'll double your salary, pay off any remaining debts you or your family carry, and give you an office where nobody will ever treat you like a piece of furniture again."

Maya stared at him. The rational part of her mind—the part that valued safety, legal compliance, and a quiet life—was screaming at her to turn around and walk out the door. But as she thought back to the Obsidian Room, to the sore feet, the greasy kitchen, the constant, grinding terror of eviction notices and medical bills, she realized something profound.

She had already crossed the line.

There was no going back to the third-floor walkup and the greasy apron.

"And if I say no?" Maya asked, testing the boundaries of the cage she had just stepped into.