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...
"People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him."
- Robert F. Kennedy
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The whiskey bottle was a fallen soldier on the floor, its contents now swimming in my veins, a cheap anesthetic for a pain that was anything but.
I was clinging to Jamie like he was the last solid thing in a universe that had just proven itself to be made of smoke and mirrors. My fingers were claws in the fabric of his shirt, my body shaking with the seismic force of a decade of suppressed grief finally detonating.
I wasn't just crying—I was exorcising ghosts. The tears were acid, burning through the scar tissue I had so carefully layered over the little girl he had left behind.
Ten years. A goddamn decade. A different lifetime, a black-and-white newsreel playing in a locked room in my mind. The day he walked out of that orphanage was the day the color drained from the world. We were just kids, but we knew the score. Survival was a team sport, and our team was being disbanded.
I had memorized his face that day; the determined set of his jaw, the ocean-blue eyes that held a promise he couldn't possibly keep. He was our sun, and his leaving plunged us into an eternal, bitter winter.
Life, that heartless director, didn't just fade to black—it rewrote the entire script. When we finally collided again, we were characters from different genres. The girl he had sworn to protect was now a lieutenant in a war he was sworn to prosecute, her hands stained with a different kind of ink. And the boy who fought my battles was Chicago PD's golden boy, his badge a shield against the very world I ruled.
He looked at me now and saw a stranger wearing his sister's face. I looked at him and saw a ghost wearing my brother's name.
But tonight, the genre conventions didn't apply. The mob lawyer and the cop were just costumes we had shed, leaving two bruised, bleeding survivors in the wreckage. Beneath the armor and the attitude, I was still that terrified little girl in a cold dormitory, waiting for a sun that never rose.
Then, the room did a slow, nauseating tilt. My stomach lurched, and I pushed myself upright, my hands trembling against the floor. The high from the whiskey was crashing, and the hangover was the cold, hard truth.
"Jay," I croaked, my voice sandpapered raw from sobs and scotch. "There's something I have to tell you."
His eyes, those goddamn familiar blue eyes, locked onto mine. And for the first time since he had put on the badge, they weren't judging me. They were wide, clear, and filled with a dawning horror. He knew. He knew I wasn't talking about the past anymore.
