The rain over Seattle didn’t fall so much as it drowned the city, sweeping off Puget Sound in icy sheets that rattled the glass windows of the emergency transport van.

The penthouse occupied the top three floors of the seventy-story glass monolith. It had been built as a fortress—shatterproof reinforced glass, private biometric elevators, and an independent power grid. For four years, I had lived up there, believing the heavy steel doors were designed to keep the world out.

I had never realized they were designed to keep Noah Reed in.

Dressed in a tactical black turtleneck, a heavy leather holster strapped across his chest containing two modified Kimber .45 pistols, Damian stepped out of the elevator into the marble foyer of his former home.

The air smelled of copper and burning ozone.

On the floor near the private art gallery, two security guards lay dead in pools of dark blood, their sidearms still holstered. They hadn't even seen it coming. Noah had executed them with silenced shots to the back of the head.

Damian didn't look at the bodies. He stepped over them, his footsteps silent on the white Italian marble, his gun held low at his side.

In the glass-walled study overlooking the stormy skyline of Seattle, a figure was sitting behind Damian’s massive obsidian desk.

Noah Reed was calmly pouring two fingers of twenty-year-old Macallan into a crystal tumbler. On the desk beside him sat three military-grade encrypted hard drives, a duffel bag stuffed with bearer bonds, and a heavy brass detonator connected to a blinking red timer.

00:14:22... 00:14:21...

"I knew you'd come here first, Damian," Noah said, without looking up from his glass. He lifted the scotch, took a slow sip, and let out a satisfied sigh. "You always were predictable when it came to territory. Even when the territory was compromised."

Damian walked into the study, stopping ten feet from the desk. His expression was completely blank—a terrifying mask of silence.

"You killed Thomas and Miller," Damian said, his voice eerily calm. "They had wives, Noah. Thomas had a boy who plays Little League."

Noah set the glass down with a soft clink. He looked up, his eyes cold and devoid of remorse. "They were collateral. Just like Elena was supposed to be. Do you know how hard it was to watch you build this empire, Damian? Your father built the Cross Syndicate on fear, blood, and absolute loyalty. He would have murdered a woman like Elena in her sleep if he thought she was making him weak."

"My father died in a federal penitentiary with no one to hold his hand," Damian replied coldly. "I am not my father."

"No! You're not!" Noah suddenly roared, slamming his fist onto the desk, his calm demeanor shattering into psychotic rage. "You became soft! The moment you brought that girl into this penthouse, you stopped taking the shipping routes by force! You started buying legal permits! You started paying taxes! You began negotiating with the unions! You turned a billion-dollar criminal empire into a corporate philanthropy project because you wanted to look clean in her eyes!"

"I built an empire that wouldn't put my daughter in a casket," Damian said, taking one slow, deliberate step forward.

Noah chuckled, a dry, bitter sound. He reached down and rested his hand on the brass detonator.

"She’s alive then?" Noah asked, his eyes narrowing. "The brat survived the dosage? Impressive. Dr. Lang must have used an atropine flush. No matter. She’ll grow up without a father anyway."

"Is that right?"

"This building is rigged with six thermite charges, Damian," Noah sneered, his finger resting on the big red button. "The moment I press this, the structural steel supporting the top five floors will liquefy at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. In three minutes, this entire penthouse will collapse into the elevator shafts. My helicopter is waiting on the helipad above us. The hard drives in this bag contain every shell company, every offshore account, and every bribe you've ever paid in this city. If I push this button, you die, your empire dies, and I walk away with two hundred million dollars."

Damian didn't look at the detonator. He didn't look at the gun Noah slowly pulled from his belt beneath the desk.

Instead, Damian looked up at the ceiling.

"Marcus," Damian said quietly.

Noah frowned. "What?"

CRASH!

The reinforced glass skylight directly above Noah’s head exploded inward in a shower of heavy safety glass and rain.

A tactical rappelling line dropped through the opening, followed immediately by Marcus Vance. Before Noah could even pull the trigger of his pistol, Marcus swung through the opening like a pendulum, his heavy tactical boot slamming directly into the side of Noah’s jaw.

Noah was launched out of the executive chair, his body crashing through the glass display coffee table. The brass detonator slid across the slick floor, spinning like a top until it bumped against Damian’s leather boot.

Damian bent down, picked up the detonator, and casually flipped the safety switch to OFF.

Noah lay groaning on the floor, surrounded by jagged glass shards, blood pouring from his shattered jaw and nose. He tried to crawl toward his dropped gun, his fingers clawing at the slick marble.

Damian walked over, his heavy boot coming down with crushing, unyielding force directly onto Noah’s right wrist.

CRACK.

Noah let out a muffled, agonizing shriek as the bones in his hand shattered.

"You made three mistakes, Noah," Damian said, leaning down, his dark face inches from his former security head.

"F... fuck... you..." Noah spat, blood spraying from his lips.

"First," Damian said, his voice dropping into a chilling whisper, "you assumed I didn't know you were stealing from the secondary accounts. I let you do it because I wanted to see how deep your network went."

Damian raised his boot and brought it down on Noah's other wrist.

CRACK.

Another shriek echoed through the ruined study.

"Second," Damian continued, his eyes burning with demonic fury, "you touched my wife. You drugged her, you terrified her, and you forced her to live in a dark, cold apartment believing she was alone in the world."

Damian reached down, grabbed Noah by the collar of his suit, and dragged his heavy frame across the floor toward the shattered floor-to-ceiling window that opened up to the seventy-story drop over Seattle.

The freezing rain roared through the opening, soaking both men as the wind howled like a pack of wolves.

"And third," Damian whispered into Noah's ear as he held the man halfway out over the abyss, seven hundred feet above the concrete street below, "you thought I became weak because I loved her."

Noah was weeping now, his legs dangling uselessly over the edge, the terrifying abyss yawning beneath him. "Damian... please... we were brothers... your father..."