Three years ago the news said he burned to death in a car explosion, but tonight he was staring at me in room 4227.

The carriage house was small, immaculate, and hidden behind a dense line of arborvitae trees.

Inside, there were no luxury oil paintings or crystal sconces like the forty-second floor of the hotel. The walls were exposed brick, illuminated by a single low-wattage desk lamp. Across a heavy oak table in the center of the room lay three laptops, encrypted satellite radios, and a massive physical map of the Chicago port district marked with blue and red pins.

Clare stood near the small kitchen counter while Nicholas locked the reinforced steel door, dropping three heavy deadbolts into place.

He pulled off his wool coat, throwing it over a chair, revealing his black leather shoulder holster.

"Drink this," Nicholas said, setting a glass of clear liquid on the counter in front of her.

"What is it?"

"Vodka," he said. "It stops the shaking."

Clare looked at the glass, then picked it up and took a long gulp. The alcohol burned her throat, but within thirty seconds, a dull heat spread through her chest, calming the sharp shivers in her fingers.

She walked over to the oak table, looking down at the map.

"What is this?" she asked.

"My uncle's empire," Nicholas said, stepping up beside her. He pointed to a red pin near the mouth of the Chicago River. "Marcus took over the syndicate by promising the council forty percent higher returns on cargo smuggling. But he didn't do it through skill. He did it by cutting a deal with the Russian Vor syndicate out of New York."

"The warehouse fire three years ago..." Clare murmured.

"Marcus set it," Nicholas confirmed, his voice dropping into an icy register. "He invited me to a meeting to finalize a dock lease. When I arrived, his men locked the steel shutters and threw six incendiary grenades through the roof skylights."

He reached up, unbuttoning his collar, exposing the top of the violent, jagged burn scar running down his collarbone.

"Twelve of my men died in that fire," Nicholas whispered. "I survived by crawling through a storm drain beneath the concrete floor. It took me two years in a private clinic in Berlin just to walk without a cane again."

Clare looked at his face—at the hard, unyielding lines of a man who had been burned alive and rebuilt himself out of pure, unadulterated vengeance.

"Why are you back in Chicago?" she asked softly.