Chapter 1 - The Weight of a Feather
My hand froze inches from the cold steel of the Sig Sauer P226. Beneath the amber glow of the bedside lamp, the source of the warmth against my side wasn't an assassin, an operative from a rival syndicate, or a traitorous lieutenant.
It was Emma.
She was curled on top of the heavy velvet duvet, fully dressed in her faded gray cleaning uniform, fast asleep. Her breathing was shallow, punctuated by soft, exhausted sighs that sounded like dry leaves scraping across pavement. One of her hands was still clutching a damp microfiber cloth, her knuckles bruised and chapped from hours of scrubbing imported hardwood floors.
My initial wave of predatory adrenaline dissolved into something entirely unfamiliar: confusion.
"Emma," I rasped, my voice sounding like gravel grinding in a cement mixer.
She didn't stir. Her face was pale, save for the dark, bruised smudges beneath her closed eyes. In the harsh reality of daylight, she looked like a survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a piece of driftwood. Up close, in the quiet intimacy of my heavily guarded bedroom, she looked like a ghost ready to dissolve into the stale air of my fortress.
I looked at the digital clock on my mahogany nightstand. It was 3:42 AM. She had been working since nine o’clock that evening, following a nine-hour double shift at a greasy diner downtown.
For two years, my world had been rigidly binary. There were threats, and there were targets. There were people who feared me, and people who served me out of terror or greed. Emma fit none of those categories. She had bypassed three biometric security gates, a rotation of armed guards patrolling the perimeter, and a closed-circuit camera system that monitored every square inch of this estate, simply by walking through the French doors of the ground-floor conservatory because Luke had left them unlocked for the night-shift landscaping crew.
Instead of waking her, or hitting the panic button embedded in the mattress frame that would bring four armed men through my mahogany doors in under fifteen seconds, I did something I hadn't done since the sniper's bullet severed my spine.
I sat completely still and watched someone else sleep.
The phantom pain in my legs had faded to a dull, throbbing ache, replaced by a strange tightness in my chest. Slowly, agonizingly, I maneuvered my upper body, using my powerful shoulders and arms to shift my weight away from her. My legs remained dead weights, heavy and unresponsive beneath the dark wool trousers I never bothered to take off before bed.
I reached out, my fingers hovering over her shoulder. I meant to shake her awake, to demand an explanation for why she had wandered into the inner sanctum of the most feared underworld boss in Chicago and fallen asleep like a stray cat on a porch.
Instead, my fingers brushed a stray lock of brown hair away from her damp forehead. Her skin burned with feverish heat.
"Damn it, Emma," I whispered into the quiet dark.
May you like
A sudden, sharp knock echoed at my heavy oak door. Before I could answer, Luke let himself in, his gun already half-drawn from its shoulder holster. His eyes darted from my face to the figure curled beside me on the bed, and his jaw practically hit the floor.
"Danny," Luke breathed, his eyes wide with a mix of shock and lethal calculation. "Do you want me to put a bullet in her, or should we interrogate her in the basement?"
