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...
"Every murder turns on a bright hot light, and a lot of people . . .have to walk out of the shadows."
- Albert Maltz
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The name just rattled around my skull like a lone bullet in a spent chamber.
Theodore. Pierce. My uncle. The man who had been my north star since I was old enough to understand what a man should be. He was more than family; he was a fucking institution. And if what Frankie said was true, that institution was built on a foundation of his own brother's bones.
No. The denial was a fortress in my mind, but the artillery had already found its range. This couldn't be true. It was Frankie's last, most desperate play. A poison pill designed to scorch the earth between us forever.
But what if it wasn't?
The entire architecture of my life underwent a sudden, catastrophic renovation. Every memory I had of him did a little flip, showing its ugly underside, every time he had looked me in the eye with pride... it all began to rot in real-time, curdling into something monstrous.
I'd loved him. I would have died for him. The sheer, biblical scale of the betrayal was an intellectual concept I couldn't yet grasp, but my body understood. My lungs refused to work properly. The air had turned to syrup, to broken glass.
I needed a release. A sound. A sensation to ground me. I turned and my fist met the wall. A loud, brutal thud that sent a jarring pain radiating through my whole arm.
I did it again. And again. The pain in my knuckles was a clean, honest fire; a welcome distraction from the nuclear meltdown happening in my soul. I looked at the blood, my blood, smearing the wall.
I sank to my knees, breathing like I had just run from hell itself. My hands trembled, dripping crimson onto the floor. A hot, shameful wetness blurred my vision.
Tears? I swiped at my face with a torn and bloody knuckle, disgusted by the sheer weakness. This wasn't the time for grief. Grief was for later. Now was the time for facts. For the whole, unvarnished, goddamn truth.
I forced myself upright. The rage was a caged beast now, and I had to point it in the right direction. The drive to Conor's estate was a blur of streetlights and screaming silence. I didn't see the road—I saw Theodore's face, rearranging itself from father figure to monster.
Conor's men knew me. They saw the storm in my eyes and simply opened the gates. Smart men. I stormed through the halls, until I reached his office. I half wanted to kick the door down, but I respected the man too much for that. I knocked.
