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...
"Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?"
- Holly Near
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She made me watch.
She forced me to cradle the vessel that was my cousin as the essential heat, the very animation of him, made its final retreat. I felt it leave as a slow, inevitable seep into the indifferent concrete. And she just stood there, a statue of absolute verdict, not a flicker in her eyes to suggest she had just re-arranged the whole damn family tree with one pull of the trigger.
And for what? Some fucked-up, self-serving sermon on justice? A bullet-point in her personal manifesto of righteousness? My brain was a scratched record, skipping on the question: Why? Why? Why?
I never knew fury could have this particular texture. It wasn't a fire; it was a chemical burn eating away at the memory of what I thought we were. Love? That word felt like an artifact from a dead language
All my vocabulary had been reduced to one core, burning syllable: hate.
I hated that I opened the door to her. I hated that I let her walk into the sacred, broken spaces of my family. I hated that I allowed myself the luxury of believing, even for a single, stupid heartbeat, that she was any different from the brutal cold world we came from.
Frank Monroe was gone. The woman I had known was a costume she had taken off. The person left standing there was just the truth; a sharp and ugly truth.
I buried my cousin in the cold ground yesterday. Daniel was a walking catastrophe, a carbon copy of his father. He had his father's rotten blood in him, a taste for easy money and hard consequences.
But he was mine. My little cousin. I was the one who held his shoulders, running beside that wobbly bike until he found his balance and rode away, whooping, never looking back. We grew up. We grew apart. He chose a path I wanted no part of. But I never wanted him to be a lesson. She made him one.
She didn't even blink.
I was on my knees, the words "I can fix this" a raw plea in my throat. But she wasn't listening to me. She was listening to some other, colder frequency. The look she gave me in that final second—it was the look you give a stranger, an obstacle.
And in that moment, the sickening truth dawned: I was never anything more than a temporary utility to her.
She could have given me five seconds. One lousy, stinking second to talk him off the ledge, to disarm hil. But no. Frankie wasn't in the negotiation business. She was in the demolition business.
She solved the Daniel-problem for me. Permanently. With a single, precise piece of copper-jacketed therapy.
Now Daniel was fertilizer. My uncle was a hollowed-out shell, staring at walls that showed him nothing. And me? I felt like a equation that no longer balanced. The sum of my parts didn't add up to a whole man anymore.
