I was holding my mistress’s hand in a private hospital room when my dying wife was rushed past me on a blood-soaked stretcher. I had spent a year betraying Clara, but the real shock came hours later, when her shattered phone revealed why she had been on the other side of Chicago that night.

The South Side of Chicago smelled of wet sulfur, dead steel, and the rotting timber of defunct lumber yards.

Rain had begun to fall—a freezing, needle-sharp drizzle that turned the soot on the pavement into black grease. We drove down Halsted in an armored Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows and blacked-out plates. Mateo drove, while two chase cars followed fifty yards behind, their headlights dimmed to amber parking strips.

The intersection of 47th and Halsted was cordoned off with fluttering yellow police tape, but the patrol cars were gone. A phone call from my personal attorney to the First Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department had cleared the scene of curious uniforms an hour ago. The city knew when Dominic Valente needed privacy.

The wreckage had not yet been cleared.

The black Mercedes Maybach was crumpled like an empty beer can against the massive load-bearing brick pillar of the abandoned Union Ironworks foundry. The front axle was snapped clean off; the engine block had been shoved through the firewall, occupying the space where Tommy had sat.

I stepped out of the Escalade. The cold night air hit my lungs like shattered glass, clearing the foul hospital fog from my head.

I walked slowly toward the crushed metal. The smell of scorched rubber, spilled synthetic oil, and battery acid hung thick under the rain.

I stood by the driver's side door. Tommy had died instantly; the steering column had impaled his sternum. A dried pool of blackish blood coated the driver’s seat. Tommy had been with my father before he was with me. He had taught me how to shoot a Colt .45 when I was twelve years old at our summer compound in Wisconsin.

He died in a filthy gutter because of my blindness.

I walked around to the passenger side.

The rear passenger door had been sheared away by the fire department’s hydraulic cutters. On the floor mat lay a single emerald silk high-heeled shoe, soaked in rainwater and stained with dirt. Beside it was a scatter of cosmetics, shattered glass, and a small, gold-plated fountain pen I had given Clara for our third anniversary.

I picked up the shoe. It was cold. It felt impossibly light in my massive, leather-clad hand.

“Dom,” Mateo called out from twenty yards away, near the entrance of the abandoned rail yard across the asphalt. “Over here.”

I dropped the shoe back onto the ruined seat and walked over, my heavy boots crunching against broken safety glass.

Mateo was shining a tactical flashlight into the bed of the heavy municipal plow truck. The vehicle was a monster—an old International Harvester painted city orange, but stripped of all municipal tracking numbers and department decals. The plow blade had been welded with heavy steel angle-irons, turning it into a battering ram designed specifically for vehicular homicide.

“Look at the transmission,” Mateo pointed out, tracing the beam of light under the chassis. “High-torque aftermarket installation. This thing was built to crush an armored limousine. Whoever set this up spent at least two weeks retrofitting this rig.”

“And the driver?” I asked.

“Track dogs lost the scent three hundred yards into the rail yard. He hopped an empty freight heading south toward Blue Island.” Mateo spat on the ground. “Professional. No brass left behind, no prints on the wheel. He wiped the cab down with ammonia before he bailed.”

“Not entirely professional,” a voice echoed from the shadows behind the rusted loading dock.

Mateo drew his suppressed Sig Sauer in a fraction of a second, the slide clicking back as his laser sight cut through the gloom.

“Stand down, Mateo,” I ordered calmly, raising a hand.

Out of the darkness stepped an old man wrapped in a soaked wool trench coat, leaning on an iron cane. His hair was pure silver, his face mapped with deep, hard scars that dated back to the Chicago street wars of the 1980s.

Lorenzo Moretti.

Behind him, four shadows materialized from the ruined brick arches—men holding compact submachine guns, their fingers resting on the trigger guards.

“You’re out of your jurisdiction, Dominic,” Moretti said, his gravelly voice cutting through the hiss of the rain. “You bring three carloads of iron onto 47th Street without asking permission, usually you go home in a wooden crate.”

“My wife is in a coma at Northwestern,” I said, not moving an inch. “Her unborn child is dead. Her driver is at the morgue. If you had anything to do with this, Lorenzo, you won’t have to worry about wooden crates. I’ll burn this entire neighborhood until there isn't a brick standing from here to the Indiana border.”

Moretti stopped five paces from me. He looked at the mangled Maybach, then looked into my eyes.

He didn’t blink.

“I hate you, Dominic,” Moretti said with terrifying sincerity. “Your father stole the South Chicago railyards from me in ’94, and you’ve been choking my supply lines for five years. I want to see you broke, begging for mercy on your knees. But I don’t kill women. And I sure as hell don’t kill unborn children. That’s bad for business, and it’s bad for the soul.”

“Then why was the hit staged two blocks from your main processing warehouse?” I demanded.

Moretti sneered, exposing gold-capped teeth. “Because someone wanted you to do exactly what you’re doing right now. They wanted the Valente bull to see red and charge straight into my territory, sparking a full-scale turf war that would drag the CPD and the FBI down on both of our heads.”

Moretti reached into his coat. Mateo’s gun twitched, but Moretti didn’t pull iron.

He pulled out a manila envelope, water-resistant and sealed with red wax. He tossed it against my chest. I caught it out of the air.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Two hours before that plow slammed into your car, one of my lookouts spotted that orange truck idling behind my fuel depot,” Moretti said. “My boy thought it was city workers looking for copper to steal, so he snapped some digital photos with a night-vision scope. Look inside.”

I tore the wax seal. Inside were three high-resolution black-and-white photographs.

The first showed the driver of the plow truck. He was wearing a dark knit cap, but his profile was clear: sharp hooked nose, a prominent tattoo of an eagle on his neck.

“Viktor Radek,” I whispered.

“One of your private security contractors,” Moretti spat. “Julian Vance hired him three years ago to run security for your Racine logistics center. The hitman wasn't mine, Dominic. The hitman wears your payroll jacket.”

My vision narrowed until all I could see was the face in the photograph.

Viktor Radek was Julian’s personal hound. Whenever Julian needed an recalcitrant union rep silenced or an auditor intimidated, Viktor was the man sent into the dark.

“Where is he, Lorenzo?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm.

Moretti smiled thinly. “He didn't hop a freight train to Blue Island. My boys caught him twenty minutes ago trying to hotwire a sedan behind a dive bar on 51st. He thought he was home free.”

“Is he alive?”

“He is,” Moretti chuckled, a dry, rattling cough. “Though he’s missing a few fingernails. Consider it a professional courtesy from the old guard. You want him?”

“I want him,” I said.

“Then we have an understanding,” Moretti said, tapping his iron cane against the wet asphalt. “You take your trash out of my territory. And when you skin Julian Vance, you make sure he screams loud enough for me to hear it from Lake Shore Drive.”

Moretti turned his back on me and walked into the shadows of the foundry. His men faded back into the dark like wraiths.

I looked down at the photograph of Viktor Radek.

“Mateo,” I said, turning toward our Escalade.

“Yeah, Dom?”