He's her enemy. Her obsession. And the only man who has the power to destroy her.
▫️▫️▫️
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...
"Karma comes after everyone eventually. You can't get away with screwing people over your whole life, I don't care who you are. What goes around comes around. That's how it works. Sooner or later the universe will serve you the revenge that you deserve."
- Jessica Brody
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
That night, the silence after my breaking down was heavier than the words. It hung in the room like smoke after a gunfight, thick and charged and smelling of spent emotions. He was just... holding me. Hector Pierce. A man who could break a man's bones with the casual grace of someone opening a book, holding me as though I were made of blown glass and regret.
I had vomited my darkest history onto his lap, had shown him the festering, ugly wound at the core of me, the one that never really healed, and he didn't look at me with pity, that pathetic look I couldn't stand. He looked at me with... recognition.
My pain didn't scare him. It didn't excite him. It just was. A fact of our universe. And his response wasn't to try and fix it, or to use it. It was to simply... meet it, to hold its weight with me.
I could still feel the ghost of his hands on my face as he cradled it as though I were something precious and worth preserving. Me. Frank Monroe. A girl from the wrong side of everything, with a soul so stained it was a miracle it hadn't bled out yet.
And that question. "What did that animal do to you?" It wasn't asked with morbid curiosity. It was a demand for the enemy's name. A target acquisition. And the fury in his eyes when I told him... it wasn't for me. It wasn't performative. It was a cold, clean, righteous fury on my behalf. A fury that mirrored my own, but was somehow purer. Untainted by the shame that always, always came with it for me.
He hated that the bastard was already dead. I felt that. A current of pure, undiluted violence humming under his skin, with no outlet. He wanted to wage a war that had already ended. For me.
He was the most dangerous man I had ever met. And in the aftermath, in the wreckage of my own vulnerability, he felt like a sanctuary, promising to keep me safe. And God help me, I had never wanted anything more.
The phone rang on my desk, a sharp, intrusive sound that seemed to amplify in the vast, quiet space of my office. I let it trill twice, my eyes scanning the unknown number displayed on the screen before I picked it up.
"Frank."
The voice on the other end was smooth. "Frank Monroe. A pleasure, truly. I've heard so much."
"Who's this?" I asked, though a part of me already knew. The cadence, the effortless, casual power in the tone; it was the voice of a man who owned the very air he breathed.
"Titus Minetti."
Titus. Fucking. Minetti. The Alchemist of Miami. The man who didn't just traffic in narcotics, but alchemized them, turning cocaine into crown jewels and heroin into a holy empire. His product was the gold standard, the benchmark against which every cartel, syndicate, and two-bit crew with ambition measured themselves. Who in my world didn't know that name?
