Two little boys showed up at my Chicago headquarters asking for me. The older one said, “Mom told us to find you.” Then I saw his eyes, looked at his little brother, and realized both boys had the exact same eyes as me.

The reinforced tires of the Maybach shrieked against the damp concrete as Marcus hurled the heavy luxury sedan through the subterranean freight tunnels beneath downtown Chicago. These old limestone and brick tunnels—built a century ago for underground rail freight—were a forgotten maze that only a handful of underworld bosses knew how to navigate.

Behind us, the sharp pop of suppressed gunfire echoed down the damp stone corridor. Two black pursuit SUVs, outfitted with reinforced steel plating and tinted tactical glass, had burst out of the sub-basement ramp just fifty yards behind our tail, their high-beam headlights cutting through the subterranean gloom like searchlights.

"They’re gaining on us, boss!" Marcus shouted, his hand gripping the steering wheel tightly while blood slowly seeped through the field bandage on his shoulder. "The suspension on the freight tunnel is too uneven—we can’t shake them at high speed!"

I turned around in my seat to check on the boys. Noah had his arms wrapped tightly around Caleb, shielding his little brother on the floorboards of the back seat, their eyes wide with sheer terror.

"Stay down!" I ordered, before turning back to face the front.

I popped the glove compartment, pulled out a remote detonator linked to the structural seismic charges I had secretly installed years ago in the old freight transit hubs, and smiled grimly.

"Marcus, hit the brakes hard on my mark, then floor it through the bulkhead door fifty yards ahead."

"Got it!" Marcus yelled.

"Three... two... one... mark!"

Marcus slammed the anti-lock brakes, sending the Maybach into a controlled four-wheel drift that kicked up a storm of concrete dust. At the exact same second, I depressed the detonator trigger.

BOOM.

A deafening shockwave reverberated through the ancient limestone tunnel. Above the pursuit vehicles, tons of reinforced concrete and brick archways collapsed instantly, burying both of the Council’s armored SUVs in a mountain of rubble and dust. The red glow of their taillights vanished beneath the grey shroud of debris.

The Maybach rocketed through the parting cloud of smoke, bursting out of the secret subterranean exit into the cool, damp night air of an abandoned shipping yard near the Chicago River.

Marcus exhaled a long, shaky breath, letting up on the throttle as we cruised onto an empty expressway heading north out of the city. "That... was entirely too close, boss."

"We’re not out of the woods yet," I said, pulling Viktor’s confiscated encrypted tablet from my coat. I tapped the screen, utilizing my master administrative bypass codes to hack into the local cellular network pinging from the tablet.

A GPS map popped up on the display, showing a live coordinate signal transmitting from an isolated lake house up near the Wisconsin border.

Next to the coordinate was a text message log from an unknown sender: “Target secured at the safehouse. Bring the boys by midnight, or the mother dies.”

My heart stopped. Hannah.

She wasn't dead. The Council had captured her and was holding her at the old family estate on the shores of Lake Geneva, using her as leverage to force me to hand over the boys and abdicate my throne.

I looked back at Noah and Caleb in the back seat. Noah was stroking his little brother’s hair, whispering soft reassurances to calm him down. They were exhausted, terrified, and relying entirely on a father they had only met an hour ago.