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...
"There is a certain justice in revenge as there is in the law."
- Edgar Allan Poe
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Morality.
What did I know about morality? It was a meaningless word thrown around by people who had the luxury of giving a shit. I wasn't one of them.
By day, I played the part of a criminal defense lawyer, spinning half-truths and legal loopholes to keep men who bled the streets out of prison.
But when the sun went down.. that was when the real work began. I became a purer thing. A force of nature with a silencer.
A judge, jury, and executioner who didn't believe in appeals. My conscience wasn't a guide—it was a vestigial organ I had surgically removed.
Papa, God love him, used to insist it was still in there. "You have a conscience, Frankie," he would say, like he was pointing out a birthmark.
But if I ever had one, I had buried it in a shallow grave somewhere along the way. A conscience was a compass that pointed you toward noble ways to die. Mercy was a crack in your armor, and in my line of work, cracks got you killed.
Secrets? Lies? They were just tools. A lie was a blunt instrument. A secret was a scalpel. You used the right one for the job.
But Salvatore's secret... that wasn't a tool. That was a landmine he had buried in the middle of our relationship.
He had known my father. Not in the abstract, "I-knew-of-him" way. He had known him. And he had held that card so close to his chest I had never even seen him shuffle the deck.
The betrayal wasn't a hot knife; it was colder than that. It was like dry ice burning a hole in my gut, a slow, silent corrosion that was just waiting to break through.
Did I trust him?
There was a part of me, a stupid, trusting part that lived in a world where people didn't lie about the dead, that wanted to scream yes. That wanted to believe there was a good reason. A noble reason.
But the rest of me? The part that had been carved out by a lifetime of this shit? That part was just laughing. A cold, hollow laugh that echoed in the empty spaces he had left behind. That part remembered that trust was the first thing they asked you to surrender before they slid the knife in.
And yet.
I needed the answer. It was a physical need now, an itch in my brain I couldn't scratch.
How had Salvatore Lombardi known John Hansley?
And the question that was really eating me alive: why the hell had he thought he had to keep it from me?
The photograph was beginning to warp in my grip, the glossy surface buckling under the pressure. I hadn't even registered the white-knuckle tension in my hand until the blood drained from my fingers.
