Chapter One

Richard

People often said I reminded them of my dad, which I considered the highest of praises. Not because he was a “good” man; no, a good man would be enjoying this lovely Chicago spring day doing ordinary things, whereas my dad spent his days on shipping docks, ensuring that his heroin supply arrived safely.

Good men didn’t run mafias. Good men didn’t extort, deal, and murder. Good men didn’t train their sons to do the same.

But God above, I was proud to be like him.

According to my mom, I looked more like her than him or my biological father.

Of course, our similarities were not physical. Physically, we were very different.

Where dad had curly blonde hair, now streaked with grey around the temples, mine was as black as my mother’s.

I was built with lean muscle for speed and maneuverability, whereas my dad had always had more visible strength.

Fifty-one years alive, and that muscle definition wasn’t as obvious as it used to be, but I knew from experience that he could still lay a man flat out.

It wasn’t his body that showed his age. That privilege went to the wrinkles on his face, the crow’s feet from laughing with us, the frown lines from his stern demeanor at work and the wrinkles on his forehead from the stress of both.

Sometimes, he said he didn’t know what was harder—being a father of three or ruling over the largest, most prominent mafia family in Chicago.

We’d always laughed at him when he said that because we all knew he’d never give up either.

Now, shielding his light eyes from the glare of the water and his grey-threaded blonde curls displaced by the breeze, I was filled with quiet awe of him.

It happened on occasion, watching him shoulder what seemed like all the world’s weight without flinching, and not for the first time, I hoped I was half the man he was.

Again, a weird thing to contemplate while waiting on a shipment of Colombian heroin, but that was just how things went sometimes in this family.

I turned away from him to peer up the ship’s lofty side as the crane pulled container after container from the deck and stacked it neatly on the concrete. It was a tedious and noisy procedure, but dad told me that this was one of the most important shipments he’d received during his time as Don. It was a new era for the Marino family, and until this process became customary, one of us would need to be present to supervise it. Everything had to go well.

The crane operator did as we instructed and placed our shipping container separately, and as soon as we had the clear, my dad walked up to it with single-minded intent. I followed him, as did the four soldiers with us.

The door unlatched with a loud metallic clank as one of the soldiers hefted it open for us, forcing his entire body into it. The locks on these things were no joke. I took a subtle, deep breath to calm my nerves.

It looked like any other shipping container, with ten ordinary pallets of average crates neatly arranged and wrapped in layers of plastic wrap to keep everything together. A forklift would be required to move them, but that could wait. We merely needed to open them and ensure that the goods had arrived.

I waved my hand, and the remaining soldiers moved forward. They sliced the plastic with a pocketknife, cut the strap with a jerking saw-like motion, and finally pulled the corner box down from above their heads with a grunt. I resisted the urge to wipe my sweaty palms on my pants.

Dad nodded to me, all business, and I stepped forward. Normally, menial work like opening shipping crates would be below me as the underboss, but then again, even being at the shipping dock wasn’t something I’d had to do more than a handful of times. And none of them had ever had a payload like this.

The crowbar pried open the crate with a loud crack as I twisted it, and with a little wiggling, the thing was open.

And then things went to shit.

“Chicago PD, step away from the box!” My hand, along with every other, went straight for our guns. Frankly, it was an instinct. Dad didn’t even twitch.

“Stand down!” he barked at us.

The emotional whiplash of just those two sentences had me drawing up short.

It was astonishing how quickly I went from terrified to defensive to bewildered to betrayed to understanding to angry. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—Even though I was internally both panicked and seething, I slowly released my weapon and saw the others do the same.

A shootout would not work out in our favor today.

My father put his hands up but otherwise stayed perfectly still. He didn’t even turn around to look at the officers as he addressed them. I counted seven, but who knows how many they had hidden in the recesses of shipping container towers? I gritted my teeth and glared.

“Apologies, officers; as you know, my bodyguards are trained to react to sudden disruptions,” dad said smoothly. “How can I help you today?”

“Cut the shit, Marino,” the lieutenant said, all but spitting our name. It made me furious. “We’re here to inspect your cargo.”

“On what grounds?” dad asked affably as if his eyes weren’t icy cold. Still, they couldn’t accuse him of being hostile to them.

“On the grounds of we’ve got a warrant,” the lieutenant snarked. Dad’s mouth twitched down almost unnoticeably, and I knew why.

The ship had just docked, and our shipping container had hit the ground all of five minutes before we opened it. There was no way they got a warrant to search when there wasn’t even evidence yet, but there it was in his hand.

“May I see it, officer?” dad asked. The lieutenant scowled but complied.

“Everybody keep your hands where I can see them,” he said. I obeyed. I hated doing it, but I did. If dad had decided that playing along was the best option, then that was exactly what we were going to do. We didn’t need to actively antagonize the police, even if I was committing this lieutenant’s face to memory with a little too much vehemence.

Dad wasn’t given the okay to turn, so he didn’t, just waiting as calmly as he could while the lieutenant walked up behind him, one hand still poised on his gun. Most people wouldn’t have noticed the tension in his shoulders as he fought the instinct to keep the armed enemy in sight, but I did.

The warrant was produced, and dad took it with a polite thank you.

I stood rigid as he quickly looked it over, not that the police needed him to. The whole point of a warranted search was that they didn’t need his approval. Still, there were guns on both sides, and I’m sure the PD wanted this resolved as non-violently as possible.

“Thank you,” dad said after a moment. “I would like a copy of this for my records, please. Gentlemen, step back and let the officers do their work.”

I did as ordered, and the other soldiers followed my lead. We all kept our hands up.

I wanted to see that warrant so damn bad.

The thing was that the police knew who we were. The entire city knew who we were.

But they couldn’t prove it or get any charges to stick, partly because of good lawyers and partly because we were good at our jobs.

We were constantly caught in this ludicrous dance in which we claimed to be regular upstanding businessmen and they pretended to believe us, but I didn’t like how this waltz was going.

They couldn’t have a warrant. But they did, because if it was falsified, dad would have called it out immediately.

They had to have gotten enough notice to seek a judge for the warrant, obtain it, and be here to serve it, and there was no way they could have done so within the time the ship was docked. Furthermore, no judge would approve a warrant without evidence, even if they knew it was us.

So what did they have on us, and how long had they had it?

And who gave it to them?

But that was a problem to be solved once the police weren’t close enough to count our nose hairs.

My immediate concern was that the police were diving fingers-first into what was anything but an average delivery. Sure, we made it look like one, but they were coming in here with such single-minded certainty that I knew they wouldn’t be leaving until they’d uncovered it. I watched with shrewd eyes.

“Richard Marino?” one cop asked, sidling up to me. I glanced at him, then back to the three policemen unpacking the box.

Out came one light fixture, then the other…

“Yes, that’s me,” I answered, biting back my annoyance at having this half-wit in my face. The cop, a man coming out of middle age with a thinning hairline to prove it, gave me a hard look all over.

I could tell he was trying to gauge my threat level and was smart enough to assume it was reasonably high. Good.

“Working as a bodyguard?” he asked. I grunted. “I’ve never met a man who would expect his son to take a bullet for him.” I grinned sharply.

“Oh, you must be new to Chicago,” I said with feigned mirth. “Everyone in this city knows that he pushed me, his bodyguard, to the side and then ended up taking a bullet himself. The press went crazy about it. A simple Google search will surely answer any questions you might have; it was only a year ago, after all.” The officer, who had most likely lived in Chicago his entire life, got all broody as he scowled at me. I just smiled even brighter.

He could play his petty games all he wanted, but he was still going to lose. I learned the art of the clapback from my mother. She was a stripper for the majority of my early childhood—and strippers were brutal clapback suppliers.

“This lamp is heavier than the other ones,” another cop, elbow-deep in our box, declared.

Fuck.

The light fixtures that would be installed in one of our hotels were modern in style. Each one resembled a pinwheel of sticks and orbs, and although sticks were simply sticks, orbs could hold a variety of items. Say, a lightbulb.

Or a carefully wrapped bag of heroin.

But the fact that they immediately singled out one of them over the rest—now that was a problem. No matter what that fool said, we’d taken specific precautions so that the weight difference between those with and without heroin would be negligible. Unless it was packaged incorrectly in Colombia, that man shouldn’t be able to tell just from feeling them. A drug-sniffing dog could pick it out if they were all lined up but—

Wait, they didn’t even bring dogs.

This amount of intel, and they didn’t know it was a drug bust? Or did they know and were so confident that they didn’t need the dogs to do the job?

Nothing about this made sense, but lo and behold, when they unscrewed the first orb, heroin fell out.

“Looks like heroin, sir!” One of the officers said while picking up a baggie without any gloves on.

Although I suppose they didn’t need to swab for prints as they had already caught us red-handed. “Five baggies, looking like an ounce each. There’s likely more hidden throughout the shipment.”

My mind was already whirling, giving up making sense of the last minute and a half in favor of figuring out what would happen next, and I could see my dad going through potential scenarios as well.

One thing was for sure—we were actually, genuinely in deep shit.

“In that case, we’re going to have to take you in,” the lieutenant told my father, looking smug. “Put your hands behind your head and keep them there—and the rest of you, do not move, my men will react. I can’t take you in for a shipment your names aren’t on, but one wrong move or mouthy word will get you hauled down to the station with your boss. Understood?”

Shit. Shit shit shit—

“Do you have any weapons on your person?” the lieutenant asked, one officer briskly frisking my dad down. I burned with rage. That was my dad. My dad.

“Yes, sir, a Jericho 941, legally owned and registered. It’s holstered at my right hip.” Said handgun was swiftly pulled from its holster.

“Loaded,” an officer reported.

“An unloaded gun isn’t much help in a fight,” dad smiled. “Don’t worry—you will see that the safety is engaged.” The officer looked and frowned.

“Safety is on,” she confirmed. That didn’t stop the lieutenant from wrenching my dad’s hands down from behind his head with far more force than necessary.

“Hey!” I shouted. Dad shot me a warning look. “He’s not resisting, you don’t need to be so rough!”

“You wanna come with?” the lieutenant asked threateningly. The handcuffs slapped loudly onto dad’s wrists.

“I’m just asking you to be a little gentler with an aging civilian, officer,” I said. At that my dad finally let some emotion through his calm façade—and that emotion was fond exasperation.

“Aging, Rich? Really?”

“Aging well,” I amended, rolling my eyes. Dad scoffed.

It was strange, but something about that familiar banter felt like a lifeline, and I latched onto it with surprising desperation. I guess no kid liked seeing their dad dragged off in handcuffs, even if said kid wasn’t a kid anymore. I’d always known it was a possibility, but seeing it…

I felt unmoored. Lost and young.

I did my best to pull myself together. We were going to get my father out, but in the meanwhile, I was his underboss—in his absence, the whole family would be looking to me for guidance. I wasn’t about to let them down.

Keep a cool head, my dad had said to me once. If there’s one virtue I wish I’d had more of as a young Don, it would be patience.

Well, it was time for me to put that into practice. I’d have to be patient now so that when I got Dad out later, I wouldn’t leave a single loophole for them to pull him back with.

He was a strong man—he’d be able to hold his own for a few days. I hoped.

I was just going to have to trust him to keep himself alive.

God, is this what he felt every time he sent me on a mission? I felt a lot less angry about all those years he’d held me back from fieldwork now.

Dad must have seen the fear in my eyes because even as they were pushing his head down into the squad car, he called out, “I’ll be alright, son. Just help your mom while I’m gone, you hear?”

I nodded, throat full.

That was a promise.

It meant I won’t die, and I trust you to get me out of this.

But, at the same time, it was a reminder: while he was gone, I was the acting Don, and that meant that my main concern had to be the ultimate good of the family.

He said help your mom, but he meant put the family before all else—even me. He was telling me that this might not be a battle worth fighting.

Well, fuck that. I was fighting it.

I’m sure I wasn’t hiding the anger or the fear very well, but no one ever said I had to be emotionless to be good at my job. And I was going to be damn good.

As I watched the squad car pull away, taking my father with it, I swore to the simmering hate in my chest that I would be so damn good at it that the family would be cleaner than ever by the time he was back in his office.

“Now, we are seizing this shipping container, and our office will search all its contents. We will need statements from each of you—”

“I’m not saying shit,” I grit out, glaring at the officer who’d spoken. “I’m invoking my right to stay silent.”

All the soldiers took turns saying the same, and I started planning. As soon as I was released, I’d be calling Arthur, dad’s consigliere of almost a year now, and I already knew the first thing he was going to say.

Get a good lawyer.

Chapter Two

Lauren

I huffed, rubbing my neck, trying to loosen it before returning to the never-ending mountains of paper on my desk.

Well, “desk” was a generous word. I had a fold-out table in a cramped room without any windows because ‘natural light would discolor the pages.’

I was stuck in a glorified broom closet doing barely more than an intern because I needed to be reminded that good grades didn’t translate to good work.

Funny thing is, they’d be right if I ever flaunted my academic achievements. But since I didn’t and worked hard for every scrap I salvaged for myself, they were just bitter old men playing with their power over me. Fucking disgusting.

Part of me wonders if I would have worked this hard to get into and through law school so early in life if I’d known I’d end up doing mind-numbing digitization work from cases over a decade old. Then I remembered what I was running away from and thought, yeah, I still would have worked just as hard.

Just, maybe, taken a different job after I passed the bar.

Truthfully, my job was one any intern could do. It didn’t require special knowledge or training that the interns wouldn’t already have had anyway. Still, the partners at this firm looked at my academic record and immediately decided that I must have been a stuck-up bitch who thought she didn’t have any more to learn.

So, obviously, they had to humble me so that I could “start from the bottom like everyone else.”

Except, last I checked, no other bar-certified lawyer in this firm had literal decades of student debt as I did. If that’s not starting from the bottom, then what is?

I sighed to myself. I was getting righteous again—my blood sugar was probably low.

I stood and stretched, groaning quietly as my spine remembered what the word ‘straight’ meant with a satisfying series of cracks, but based on the sounds coming through the door, I didn’t think I wanted to make the trek to the staff room just yet.

Some guy out there—not someone whose voice I could place—was talking quickly and urgently. I groaned. I didn’t want to barge into a situation, I just wanted my damn apple.

However, stepping out of my office, the words were suddenly not what I was worried about. The man I saw through the glass door of the conference room, that had been left slightly ajar, was hot.

He was easily one of the most attractive men I’d ever seen in person.

His dark hair was swept back from his forehead, leaving only a strand or two to draw my attention to his similarly dark eyes. There was something about the way they sat on his face, large and framed by the thickest lashes I’d ever seen on a man, that made him seem like he knew all too much, yet kept it all secret. I loved secrets.

He was built angular yet relatively slim, but the veins in his forearms indicated that this man was capable of delivering a devastating hit. And his hands were big. Did I mention his hands were big?

“I know it’s a real warrant, that’s half the problem!” the man insisted, those intense eyes narrowing. “The ship had just docked so there was no way they had enough time to get a warrant, let alone the evidence!”

“They must have been tipped off somehow, sir,” Barker responded, in that voice that said he was being polite but also very much trying to get the man to leave. “Regardless of the reasoning for the warrant, one was issued. This wasn’t an unlawful search; there’s nothing our office can do for you.”

“When did I say the problem was the search?” the man hissed. “If this was a real search then why didn’t they bring any drug dogs?”

I paused. Now that… that was interesting.

“Police protocol isn’t something we have any experience with—” Barker started.

“They weren’t looking for anything; they knew exactly where to go. Like the drugs had been planted there.”

“Through international shipping?” Barker said. “That would be impossible to prove.”

Now, I was intrigued. I stepped closer, my mind catching onto elements of what I’d heard and picking them apart. Sure, this guy was hot, but that fell to the wayside in the wake of a puzzle. Especially when Barker was lying.

“Listen, sir, I am very sorry, but we won’t be able to take your case. It’s just not something we can help with. I can suggest you try your luck with Charlotte Hall, she has more experience with litigating police overreach.”

Or they could just check when the warrant was written against shipping records and go from there? Check police protocol about canine units in known or suspected drugs busts?

It wasn’t like they had to prove who did it, just cast reasonable doubt that the culprit was the client.

The man snarled, wound tight. He marched out of the conference room into the reception area.

Why wouldn’t the partners take the case?

There were elements I didn’t know, sure, but they were standing so resolute it was like they’d decided not to take it before the man ever opened his mouth. And it wasn’t an impossible case—it was a good one, even.

All I’d need to find was one piece of proof that it could possibly be a setup, and the client would walk free. So what was really going on here?

The man glared at Barker and Archer for a moment before cursing hotly and storming out like he had no more time to waste when there were other lawyers in the city. Were any of them as good as Barker, Carter, and Dark? Well, not most of them, no, but there were still plenty of good options that were in the same bracket.

The man slammed the door so hard the clock on the wall fell to the floor with a vindictive clatter.

The few people gathered in the reception area started to mill away, either talking amongst themselves or returning to their tasks, but I wasn’t ready to do that just yet. Something about this just wasn’t quite adding up—there was another element here, and I was determined to know what it was. All I had to do to find out was stick around a few minutes.

People talked a lot about how old women gossip, but old men were just as bad.

With Barker and Carter both shaking their heads behind the front desk, I was sure they were going to talk about it if I stayed around them long enough.

And hey, I just so happened to need a snack.

Sure enough, by the time I was halfway through my apple, the old shits were gabbing like I wasn’t even there. “Damn, coulda been a good case,” Archer sighed. Barker groaned.

“Yeah, the whole no-drug-dogs thing really raises a lot of doubt. It would have been a pretty solid win.”

“Yeah, but never work with a Marino.”

“What was all that noise?” Dark asked, emerging from his own office.

“Marino,” his partners answered simultaneously. I’d heard that name before, everyone had in Chicago.

“I had heard rumors that since Bernie Silverstein died, the Marinos were looking for a new firm. Bernie had been representing the family for decades, but Silverstein jr. has decided to do things differently and they had a break up,” added Carter.

“Yeesh. You do one case for them and they’ve got you in their pocket for life. No win’s worth that.” There were assenting hums all around.

“It may mean steady work,” Barker shrugged, “but it’s the only work you’ll ever get again. No one willingly says ‘oh yeah, lemme just hire the firm that works for the mafia. Bet they’re trustworthy folk. The only reason Silverstein can get away with it is because his dad died.”

I hadn’t had any cases relating to the Marinos yet, but I knew they were the family that basically ran Chicago’s underground.

“Yeah, I say you should never trust a snake not to bite you.”

Even I knew what the Cosa Nostra tenets were. Don’t snitch, don’t involve civilians, don’t hurt women and children—the very foundations of the Italian mafia.

Things started clicking together in my head. I needed a win, a big one, and this was arguably one of the biggest clients in the city.

And he’d just walked out the door angry.

Chapter Three

Lauren

I didn’t finish my apple, and I didn’t wait for the elevator. I ran down those side stairs like I wasn’t wearing heels, begging the universe to give me a break.

Both in the sense that I would still find him there and, pun intended, that I would not break an ankle or my neck in my rush to get to him.

The lobby was light and open, and it was clear the man was not there.

Without pausing to breathe, I dashed for the front entrance; he could have exited through the back door as well; there were parking lots on both sides of the building, but the front was more likely. If the receptionist looked at me in surprise as I sped by her, I didn’t notice it.

I had a single-minded focus.

To win a case and get myself out of that damn closet!

And oh, the universe delivered. The man was still in front of his car, unlocking it, and adrenaline gave me the little boost I needed to make it to him before he could open the door.

Of course, running in heels was a loud affair, so he’d turned to see me coming a few long seconds before I got there. In retrospect, that was probably a very good thing for me.

Sneaking up on someone raised on fighting was probably not the greatest idea.

I slowed as I reached him, panting embarrassingly hard. I was a jogger, not a sprinter. Sue me.

“I want to take your case,” I gasped quickly, pulling up short. He frowned down at me. I was right—he really did have an intense gaze. It was like all of his focus was on me and just me. Whether that was good or not… Well, I guess I’d find out.

“Come again?” he asked, suspicious. I steadied my breath, fixing my posture.

“My name is Lauren Kylin, junior partner at Barker, Carter, and Dark Attorneys, and I want to take your case.”

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