He's her enemy. Her obsession. And the only man who has the power to destroy her.
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My name is Frank Monroe, and I am the most dangerous woman in Chicago. Not because I kill, but because I make it legal. I'm the lawyer the Irish mob calls when...
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The relief I felt leaving the office was a physical thing, a slow unclenching in my shoulders after too many goddamn hours glued to that desk.
But the drive home offered no real peace.
The city had dressed itself up for the season like a cheap whore, every storefront a shimmering invitation to feel fucking merry, and from some passing car, a snippet of a Christmas song bled into the quiet of my own.
Instead of cheer, that familiar sensation started blooming behind my ribs, a cold, dense knot that made drawing a full breath feel like work.
This time of year lost its ability to warm me a long fucking time ago.
My mind, against my will, drifted to those earlier Decembers, to the particular magic that used to live in our house.
I could still picture my mother's focused expression as she iced sugar cookies, and the sound of my father's good-natured grumbling as he wrestled with a tree that was, in his words, always a few inches too goddamn tall for the stand.
Those moments felt preserved in amber, perfect and completely out of reach. What remained now was just the echo, and the emptiness it left behind.
I knew exactly when the fracture happened. It lived in my mind with a terrible fucking clarity.
Such an ordinary Saturday, the kind that should've been forgotten. Dad and Noah left together, just a quick trip to the tree lot, a small adventure for them. The mundane nature of it was what still staggered me.
He just didn't come home.
Noah had witnessed the whole thing. He had absorbed a shock that altered the very core of him, and the aftermath left a permanent change in his eyes.
As each holiday crept closer, I watched him pull inward, navigating some private landscape of memory I couldn't enter. My role was to witness this quiet withdrawal, and the profound inability to fix it for him was a feeling I had never grown fucking accustomed to.
We had tried, for a little while, to perform the old rituals. Strung lights, played music, but the effort was transparent, a pantomime of celebration that held no truth. The cheer was a facade, and everyone could feel it.
So we let it all go eventually. No more decorations, no more forced gatherings. We stopped pretending we could ever reclaim what had been ripped away.
Now, Christmas served only as an annual marker, a reminder of how everything you take for granted can be gone in a heartbeat, leaving you stranded in a completely different fucking world.
It was a little after eleven, and the house was finally quiet, Noah having drifted off during a movie night with Layla. Seeing him find a few hours of peace, a temporary escape from the constant strain this season dragged out of him, had been a genuine fucking comfort.
