The rhythmic hiss of a high-tech portable ventilator was the only sound cutting through the suffocating silence of the room. Dorrent had bypassed every standard medical protocol, forcefully transferring Jannah from the vulnerable corridors of the Upper District Hospital to the absolute security of his personal home care setup within the East Wing. She lay perfectly still beneath the silk sheets, her pale face completely drained of color, but her chest rose and fell in a shallow, steady rhythm that proved her resilient omega biology was stubbornly clinging to life.

Standing on the opposite side of the bed, Shadron adjusted his premium designer cuffs, his sharp eyes locked onto the motionless girl. He leaned forward slightly, studying the soft, delicate curve of her jawline and the dark eyelashes resting against her porcelain skin.

"I have to admit, Dorrent... now that I am seeing her up close like this, I entirely see why you have become so insanely possessive of her," Shadron murmured, his voice a low, analytical drawl. He crossed his arms, shaking his head in a mixture of fascination and disbelief. "She is absolutely stunning, even while looking half-dead. She has this pure, incredibly innocent look on her face that makes a man want to either fiercely protect her or completely break her to pieces. She doesn’t look like a slum rat at all."

"Shut your damn mouth, Shadron," Dorrent cursed him, his voice a dangerous, sub-zero growl that instantly vibrated with an aggressive wave of winter-frost pheromones. He didn’t lift his eyes from Jannah’s pale forehead, his knuckles turning white as he clenched his fists in his pockets. "Keep your pathetic commentary away from her. If you came here just to drool over her, I will have security throw you off the balcony before you can take another breath."

Shadron raised his hands in a brief, mocking gesture of surrender, though his expression quickly shifted into a deeply serious, calculating line. He stepped away from the monitoring equipment, looking at his billionaire friend’s rigid profile. "Alright, fine. Let’s speak about the logistics of this disaster. What exactly are you planning to do now? Do you plan on looking through whoever orchestrated that hit on the road, and what the hell was their actual motive for opening fire on your vehicle?"

"I don’t need to look very far," Dorrent stated, his jaw tightening until a sharp muscle twitched aggressively against his cheek. His silver eyes darkened into a freezing, storm-like void. "I already have a highly precise clue on exactly who the culprits were. Jannah is Damian Boren’s girlfriend. I caught them myself in the lower sector, and she admitted it to my face. Since that gutter-doctor’s father happens to be the literal Mafia God of the criminal underground, Damian probably ran straight to him, sought for his brutal help to eliminate me from the picture, and the hitmen simply botched the assignment."

The exact millisecond the name left Dorrent’s lips, Shadron’s entire posture went completely, paralyzingly rigid. His eyes widened in absolute, genuine shock as he took a sudden step backward, his face turning pale.

"What... Bellero Boren?!" Shadron gasped out, his voice shaking slightly as he looked at Dorrent as if the tech tycoon had lost his mind. "Fuck, Dorrent! What the hell have you gotten yourself into? Are you completely insane? Bellero is an absolute psychopath—he is so unhinged and ruthlessly territorial that he doesn’t care about boundaries or law enforcement! Let me remind you of what that monster is capable of. There was a time, about three years ago, when Bellero caught me in a VIP lounge with one of his favorite women. And fuck... that old bastard absolutely loves to fuck, he keeps a literal harem of beautiful omegas, but he is completely lethal about his property. The moment he found out I had touched her, he didn’t care who my family was. He had his syndicate enforcers beat me up so brutally that I woke up with three broken ribs and a ruptured spleen."

Shadron rubbed his chest unconsciously, the phantom memory of the underworld violence making his throat dry. "I ended up locked in a hospital for two full months just to piece my skeletal structure back together."

Dorrent’s head snapped up slowly, his eyes locking onto his best friend with a sudden, sharp clarity as a cold, mocking smirk touched his lips. "So that time when you were rotting in that luxury hospital bed three years ago... it was entirely because you had touching Bellero’s woman? You explicitly lied to my face and told me you had gotten into a high-speed motorcycle accident on the northern highway."

"Of course I lied to you!" Shadron hissed, turning his head frantically toward the reinforced doors as if the Mafia’s men were already listening. "Who the hell proudly admits that they were almost beaten to death by a criminal dictator over a piece of ass? But that is exactly my point, Dorrent! For a ruthless, multi-district Mafia God like Bellero to deploy his hitmen and act this extreme towards a simple, penniless slum girl like Jannah is incredibly suspicious. It defies all criminal logic! There must be something profoundly, uniquely special about her or her background that we are completely missing. Either that old bastard wants her for his own bed, or there is something else far more dangerous happening behind the scenes. You need to watch your back very carefully, because if the Boren syndicate is hunting her, you are standing directly in the crossfire of a gang war."

Dorrent slowly turned his massive torso back toward the bed. He leaned down slightly, his shadow completely engulfing Jannah’s fragile, unconscious frame. Hishand came out, his long fingers hovering just millimeters above her soft, pale cheek, feeling the slight, unnatural heat radiating from her skin.

He looked at her quiet, beautiful face—a face that carried secrets he’d wish to unravel, a face that had actively tried to poison his veins, yet remained the singular key to his physical survival.

"She is a complete puzzle that I absolutely can’t solve, Shadron," Dorrent whispered, his voice dropping into a deep vibration that carried the weight of an obsession he could no longer control. "She is a total mystery that I want to uncover with my own hands, and I don’t even know where to damn well start..."