A dying little girl wearing Chicago’s most feared mafia symbol begged me not to leave her in a rain-soaked alley—and when I called her father, Dominic Rosetti, I expected a bullet, not an offer that would erase every debt I had. But his daughter’s disappearance wasn’t an accident, and by saving her, I had unknowingly stepped into the path of the people hunting her.

Before Dominic could speak, before Sal could draw his weapon, the overhead lights in the mansion flickered violently once, twice, and then went completely black.

Total darkness swallowed the dining hall, save for the pale, jagged flashes of lightning through the tall windows.

“Power outage!” Marcus shouted into his tactical comms, his voice laced with sudden urgency. “Auxiliary generators failed! We’ve been hit with an EMP!”

Chaos erupted around the table. Capos scrambled out of their seats, drawing weapons in the dark.

“It’s a trap!” Dominic yelled, drawing his pistol and firing a single warning shot into the ceiling. “Secure the perimeter! Someone breached the main grid!”

Through the open doors of the dining hall, the distant sound of heavy automatic gunfire echoed from the upper floors—rapid, concussive bursts that chilled my blood to absolute zero.

Lily.

The thought flashed through my mind like lightning. While everyone was focused on the syndicate trial in the dining hall, the Moretti family had launched a full-scale armed assault on the estate to finish what they had started two weeks ago.

I didn't wait for orders. I turned on my heel and sprinted out of the dining hall, plunging into the pitch-black corridors of the mansion.

“Leo, wait!” Dominic’s voice called out behind me, but I was already gone, dashing up the grand marble staircase three steps at a time.

The emergency red backup lights flickered to life overhead, casting a bloody, eerie glow across the portraits lining the walls. Smoke billowed from the west corridor of the second floor. Glass crunched beneath my running boots as I navigated the ruined hallway leading to Lily’s recovery suite.

Two of Dominic’s guards lay sprawled on the carpet, unconscious or worse.

I drew a small, suppressed 9mm pistol Marcus had forced me to carry earlier that week—a gun I barely knew how to use, but held with white-knuckled desperation.

As I reached the heavy oak door of Lily’s suite, it was blown inward by a concussive blast. Splintered wood flew past my face as I threw myself to the floor, sliding across the polished parquet.

Through the haze of smoke and white chemical powder from a discharged fire extinguisher, two masked men in tactical gear stood inside the room. They were holding a terrified, crying Lily wrapped in a blanket.

“Got the package!” one of the masked intruders shouted into his shoulder radio. “Moving to the extraction point!”

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My daughter dumped her wedding cake over my head and called me a burden—...

$I stepped down from a classified military transport and headed directly to the ICU, where my wife was lying with twenty-seven broken bones and a fractured skull. Outside her hospital room, her mother and six sisters stood smiling as though they were waiting for lunch to arrive. The detective assigned to her case leaned in and whispered, "Captain, this family practically controls the entire county." I stared through the glass at my wife's bruised and swollen face before answering, "Good. Because my authority extends far beyond this county."$