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...
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When I was a little girl, the other kids called me a psycho, a freak, a fucking monster.
Now, in court, they called me the Icy Queen.
Funny how people always found a name for the things they feared. And maybe they were right. Maybe I was too goddamn cold when I shouldn't be, and maybe I wasn't cold enough when I should've been.
Either way, I never lost sleep over it. People's opinions didn't mean shit. Hell, even my own fucked-up mind wasn't worth analyzing.
When it was Jamie, my older brother, standing in front of me, looking at me like I was something twisted, something rotten—like he didn't know whether to hate me or grieve for me-that shit hit different. That shit cut deep.
It shattered something fragile, something I didn't even realize was still there.
"Frankie!"
Little Johnny's voice ripped through the tension. His tiny small arms wrapped around my legs, clinging to me with all the unshakable trust only a four-year-old could have.
"I missed you, Frankie! I missed Uncle Noah!" His deep blue eyes—so much like Jamie's—shone up at me, full of innocence. Too fucking pure for a world like this.
I glanced up at Jamie, half-expecting him to snatch his son away from me like I was a plague, but he didn't. He just stared, jaw tight, like he was barely holding back whatever storm was raging in his head.
Fine. Fuck it. If he wasn't going to push Johnny away from me, I wasn't about to do it myself.
I bent down, scooping the little guy into my arms. His giggle, bright and weightless, cracked something in my chest.
"I missed you, brave boy," I murmured, pressing a kiss to his tiny nose. "Uncle Noah says hi and swears he's coming to see you soon. And guess what? He's bringing you so many presents, you won't know what to do with them!"
Johnny's grin could've melted steel. It almost made me forget what kind of fucking world we lived in. Almost.
But the second he ran inside, the second his tiny footsteps disappeared down the hall, reality snapped right back into place.
Jamie was still there. Still staring at me. Still angry. Still disappointed.
Because I killed Daniel.
The same Daniel who would've put a bullet in Jamie's skull if I hadn't beaten him to it.
I clenched my jaw, glancing at the door Johnny had just run through. Little Johnny. Named after our father, John.
And just like everything else in this fucked-up family, even his goddamn name had been a lie.
I stood outside in the dark with Jamie. The neighborhood was too quiet. The kind of quiet that made my skin crawl, that made me wonder how fast a bullet could find its way between Jamie's ribs if Luigi's men decided to stop fucking around. But explaining that to Jamie was fucking useless. He wasn't in the mood to listen.
