Rich girls forced a pregnant janitor to her knees at an elite academy—until the mafia boss she thought was dead crashed through the gates and saw her on the floor.

Headmaster Ellison swallowed so hard the click echoed in his throat. He took a hesitant, trembling step toward Damien, his spectacles slipping down his narrow nose.

"M-Mr. Rowe," Ellison stammered, his hands fluttering in a useless placating gesture. "I must protest. I am certain there has been a dreadful misunderstanding. Chloe Kensington is a distinguished honor student. Her family has donated—"

"I don't give a damn if her family bought this entire hill and paved it with gold," Damien said without looking at him.

He walked slowly toward Chloe. With every step he took, the heavy thud of his Italian leather shoes sounded like a gavel falling in an execution chamber. Chloe flinched, curling tighter against the foot of a serving station.

Damien stopped three feet from her. He looked down, his face an unreadable mask of cold stone.

"You claimed she took a Patek Philippe," Damien stated. "Rose gold. Diamond bezel. Value: roughly four hundred and twenty thousand dollars."

Chloe nodded frantically, tears streaming down her contoured makeup. "Y-Yes! It was on the marble counter by the main mirror! I went to wash my hands after third period, and when I turned around, it was gone! And she was right there! Janitors aren't supposed to be in that wing during lunch!"

"Is that so?" Damien glanced toward the corner of the room. "Vance is gone, but Leo is still here. Leo."

A massive operative with a shaved head and a scar splitting his left eyebrow stepped forward. Under his arm, he carried a heavy, ruggedized military laptop hooked into a black tactical hub.

"Boss," Leo said, his fingers already dancing across the mechanical keyboard.

"Tell me about Briarwell’s camera network," Damien instructed.

"The Headmaster claimed Hallway C-4 was down," Leo answered, his voice deep and emotionless. "He lied. It wasn't down. The IP addresses were manually routed to a local hidden partition on the main server forty minutes ago. The video was scrubbed from the active feed, but the raw drive mirrored everything to an off-site cloud."

Ellison turned the color of skim milk. "That's... that's proprietary academy data! You can't hack our—"

Leo pressed a single key.

Instantly, the four massive projection screens mounted on the dining hall walls—usually reserved for morning announcements and ivy league admission statistics—flickered, sputtered, and flared to life.

A crystal-clear, high-definition security angle appeared on the screen, stamped with today's date and a time code: *12:14 PM.*

In the video, the corridor outside the luxury third-floor girls' lounge was empty.

Then, the doors swung open. Chloe Kensington walked out, accompanied by two of her friends. She wasn't washing her hands. She was laughing, holding an iced matcha latte in one hand and her phone in the other.

On her left wrist, gleaming brightly under the fluorescent lights, was the rose gold Patek Philippe.

The entire dining hall collectively held its breath.

On screen, Chloe stopped near her personal locker—Locker 312. She opened it, took off the watch, unzipped the bottom lining of her Prada duffel bag, and shoved the watch deep into the interior pocket. Then she shut the locker, turned to her friends, and grinned. The camera clearly captured her mouthing the words: *Watch this.*

Two minutes later, the video showed Maren pushing her heavy gray maintenance cart down the hallway. She had her head down, her gait slow and labored, one hand instinctively supporting the small of her aching back.

Chloe intentionally dropped a glass bottle of cold brew right in front of the cart, shattering it across the floor.

When Maren stopped, apologized, and knelt down with a dustpan to sweep up the shards, Chloe leaned down, sneered something directly into Maren’s face, and kicked the cart into the wall.

The feed froze.

The dining hall was so quiet you could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights.

Chloe stared at the massive projection screen, her mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish. Her friends shrank back into the crowd, desperately trying to become invisible.

"Curious," Damien whispered, tilting his head slightly. "It seems the watch never left your possession, Miss Kensington. It seems you simply wanted an excuse to humiliate a pregnant woman who had the misfortune of cleaning up your garbage."

"I... I forgot!" Chloe shrieked, hysteria cracking her voice. "I forgot I put it in my bag! It was an accident! You can't blame me for an honest mistake!"

"An honest mistake," Damien repeated.

He knelt down again, bringing his eyes level with hers. The predatory darkness in his gaze pinned her in place like an insect beneath a needle.

"An honest mistake doesn't involve hacking school servers to delete the evidence," Damien said, his tone chillingly soft. "An honest mistake doesn't involve wrenching a bag from the hands of an expectant mother until she falls on stone. Do you know what happens to people who touch what belongs to me, Chloe?"

"Please," she sobbed, pressing her forehead against her knees. "Please don't hurt me! I'll give her money! My father will write a check! Five million! Ten million! Whatever she wants!"

"Your father," Damien said, rising smoothly to his feet, "doesn't have enough money to buy the breath in your lungs."

He turned his back on her, pulling an encrypted satellite phone from his breast pocket. He dialed a three-digit extension.

"Governor's mansion," a smooth, authoritative voice answered on the third ring.

"Arthur," Damien said flatly. "It's Damien Rowe."

A sharp intake of breath came over the speaker. "Damien? Good god... the rumors were true? You're alive?"

"Barely," Damien replied, his eyes roaming across the trembling faces of Briarwell’s faculty. "I'm standing in the dining hall of Briarwell Academy. Senator Marcus Kensington has an offshore trust operating out of the Cayman Islands, holding twenty-two million in unreported defense kickbacks. Release the audit to the Department of Justice in five minutes, or I release the audio recordings of your private dinner at the harbor last summer."

Silence stretched over the line.

"Consider it done," the Governor replied, and hung up.

Damien slid the phone back into his pocket. He looked at Headmaster Ellison, who looked ready to suffer a coronary.