The Maid Who Struck the King: Bound to New York’s Deadliest Billionaire

Two men clad in tactical black body armor swept into the dark room, the green infrared beams of their rifle scopes slicing through the haze of smoke and dust.

Victor didn't wait.

He lunged from the shadows with terrifying, supernatural speed. He seized the barrel of the first mercenary's rifle, driving his palm violently upward into the man's throat. Cartilage shattered with a wet crunch. Before the second shooter could pivot, Victor fired two suppressed shots from his Desert Eagle—double-tap to the chest, one to the forehead.

The two heavily armed men collapsed onto the carpet like sacks of wet cement.

Victor stripped the assault rifle from the fallen soldier, checked the magazine in one fluid motion, and turned to me. "Move. Now."

He grabbed my wrist, pulling me out into the grand hallway. The air was thick with gunpowder and the screams of dying men. Down in the main foyer, Romano guards were engaged in a vicious close-quarters firefight with the black-clad invaders.

"Who are these people?" I yelled over the deafening echoes of gunfire as we sprinted down a narrow service stairwell.

"Vance Miller's strike team," Victor said grimly. "They realized the poison failed, and they came to clean up the loose ends. They want you dead so there's no witness, and they want me dead to finish the contract."

We reached the ground-floor armory beneath the west wing. Victor punched an eight-digit code into a reinforced steel door. It hissed open, revealing a private underground garage where three armored SUVs sat ready for deployment.

Suddenly, a shotgun blast tore through the garage door behind us, sending sparks flying across the concrete floor.

Victor shoved me behind an armored tire and returned fire, letting loose a controlled burst of automatic rounds that dropped two mercenaries advancing through the doorway. But more were coming—I could hear the synchronized heavy footsteps of at least six more operatives flanking our position.

"Boss! I'm hit!"

Marco stumbled into the garage from the side entrance, clutching his bleeding shoulder, his submachine gun smoking. "They have thermal goggles, Boss! They're cutting off the exit tunnel!"

Victor looked around. His ammunition was running low, and Marco was losing blood fast. The mercenaries were pinning us down with overwhelming suppressive fire, chewing through the concrete pillars that shielded us.

"We need a distraction," Victor growled, slamming a fresh magazine into his rifle. "If I can get to the generator switch on the far wall, I can trigger the fire suppression halon gas. It'll blind their thermals for sixty seconds."

"That switch is forty feet across an open kill zone!" Marco groaned, wincing in pain. "You'll be ripped to pieces before you take five steps!"

My eyes darted across the garage. In the corner sat a commercial floor-cleaning machine—the exact same heavy industrial model I operated every night at the Plaza. It had a high-pressure motorized scrub tank filled with fifty gallons of industrial degreaser and floor sealant.

Next to it hung an emergency high-voltage cable connected to the building's backup generator.

"Cover me!" I yelled.

"Lena! No! Get down!" Victor roared, reaching for me.

I didn't listen. I dropped low, crawling beneath the chassis of the armored vehicles until I reached the industrial cleaner. I ripped the main chemical release valve wide open. Hundreds of liters of slippery, highly flammable chemical solvent flooded across the smooth concrete garage floor, spreading in a massive slick directly toward the advancing mercenaries.

Then, using a metal crowbar from the tool rack, I severed the high-voltage cable and hurled the sparking copper wire straight into the chemical puddle.

BOOM!

A blinding flash of electric blue fire erupted across the floor! The chemical ignited instantly, creating an impenetrable wall of roaring flame and thick, choking white smoke that completely engulfed the mercenaries' line of sight. Their thermal optics were instantly overwhelmed by the sudden blast of intense heat, blinding them completely.

"Now, Victor!" I screamed through the smoke.

Victor didn't hesitate. Moving like a phantom through the blinding fire, he crossed the room, engaged the emergency halon system, and flanked the blinded mercenaries. Three precise bursts echoed through the garage.

When the smoke began to settle, five enemy operatives lay motionless on the floor. The last surviving mercenary—the one with the scar over his eyebrow, Vance Miller—was pinned to the wall with Victor's hand crushing his windpipe.

Victor ripped off Miller's tactical mask, slamming the barrel of his Desert Eagle between the assassin's eyes.

"Who paid you?" Victor snarled, his voice vibrating with absolute rage. "Tell me, or I will peel you like an orange starting with your fingers."