Prologue
The city of Chicago bled neon twenty stories below my feet. Red, blue, and garish gold streaks pulsed across the obsidian marble floor, reflections fractured by the sheer wall of glass separating my sterile penthouse aerie from the teeming chaos. I stood motionless, a monolith in a tailored charcoal suit that absorbed the scant light. In my hand, I held not a glass of vodka, but a small, yellowed sketch. A stolen fragment of the Renaissance, a study of a saint’s anguished face, rendered in delicate, almost hesitant charcoal lines. The contrast was obscene: the cold, modern power surrounding me; the ancient, fragile beauty in my grip.
My thumb traced the edge of the brittle paper, feeling the tooth of it against my calloused skin. Violence lived in those hands. Violence had paid for this view, for the Klimt and the Monet hanging like trophies on the reinforced concrete walls. Violence had paid for the silence, broken only by the low thrum of the building and the mournful strains of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 filtering from invisible speakers.
A grand piano, sleek and black, occupied the far corner. Untouched for months. Dust motes danced in a stray laser beam slicing through the gloom, landing on its closed lid. My gaze flicked toward it, a muscle tightening in my jaw.
Another life.
Another lie.
This sketch, a testament to a purity I once craved, now felt like a mockery. I should destroy it, erase the reminder of a man I used to be, a man who wouldn’t have traded his soul for thislife. But the thought of its destruction, of extinguishing this last vestige of genuine beauty, felt like a betrayal of something even deeper, something that whispered of redemption in the quiet hum of my conscience. It was a weakness I couldn’t afford, a sentimentality that had no place in the world my brothers and I had meticulously built, and yet, I couldn’t bring myself to crush it.
The intercom buzzed, sharp and insistent, cutting through the symphony. It was Milo, his voice a gravelly reminder of the unpleasant task that awaited me. A message needed to be delivered—a subtle but firm reminder of our presence in this city. To forget would be to invite weakness, to expose the family’s carefully constructed façade. But the messenger I had in mind... a young woman, barely out of her teens, her innocence a stark echo of the saint in my hand. Forcing her into this game, turning her into another pawn in a brutal chess match, felt like a step too far. It was the one line I had sworn in my youth never to cross. Now the city below pulsed with opportunity and danger, and the choice was stark: protect her, and risk everything, or sacrifice her innocence to preserve the family’s legacy. The latter felt like an act of self-mutilation, a final severing of the man I claimed to be from the monster I had become. But the alternative... the alternative meant admitting weakness, and weakness was a language I refused to speak.
“Mr. Vitale?” A deep timbered voice, tight with habitual tension, crackled through the speaker. “Kate’s here.”
I didn’t turn.
“Send her up.” My voice sounded like gravel tumbling down a chute, a sound I’d cultivated like a well-worn weapon. But inside, a familiar nausea churned. Another transaction. Another soul reduced to a commodity. This was the life I helped build for myself and my brothers, and tonight, this life felt heavier than usual.
The private elevator whispered open moments later, and Kate stepped out. The scent of her cheap, cloying perfume preceded her. No doubt a desperate attempt to mask something I couldn’t quite place. It clashed violently with the lingering aroma of my Cohiba and the faint lemon oil used on the floors.
She was young.
Too young to have the hardness already settling around her eyes, a reflection of the life she was clearly trying to navigate. Her dress was shiny black, too tight, and rode high on her thighs. Red lingerie peeked from the plunging neckline. Her smile was automatic, practiced, and didn’t reach the dullness in her gaze.
A performance I knew all too well.
“Mr. Vitale,” she breathed, her voice a mix of false warmth and ingrained fear. She approached me, her spiked heels clicking a nervous rhythm on the marble. Each click was a tiny hammer blow against my conscience, a reminder of the choices that had led me here.
“You look... powerful tonight.”
I finally turned, the sketch—a ghost of the past, a time when art, not power, had been my focus—disappeared into an inner pocket as smoothly as my blade sliding home. My cold, slate-blue eyes swept over her. Assessing. Possessing. My primal instinct, honed by years of dominance, warred with a deeper, buried guilt. I saw her tremor, the barely perceptible flinch, and a surge of something akin to pity, quickly suppressed.
Pity was a weakness I could no longer afford.
“Take it off.” My words were a command, sharp and devoid of inflection.
This was the part I hated. Not the control, but the stripping away of identity, the reduction to mere flesh. But we had to show them we were untouchable; we controlled the power in this city. No one, not even her father, was immune to us. He would learn a valuable lesson tonight, and his daughter would pay the price.
She flinched almost imperceptibly. A flicker of defiance quickly extinguished. She knew the price of hesitation. Her fingers fumbled with the cheap clasp at her shoulder. The dress slithered down her body, pooling on the floor like spilled oil. She stood before me in the blood-red lingerie, the city’s chaotic light painting stripes across her pale skin. She shivered, though the penthouse was fiercely climate-controlled.
I stepped forward, closing the distance. I didn’t touch her, not yet. Just stared. My presence was a physical weight, pressing the air from the room, a manufactured aura of menace. Kate’s breath hitched. I reached out, a single finger tracing the lace edge of her bra, sliding over the curve of her breast. A calculated cruelty, designed to shatter any remaining vestiges of her composure. And with it, another piece of my own eroded integrity chipped away.
She gasped, making a small, sharp sound.
“Cold hands,” she whispered.
“Get used to it,” I rumbled. My words were meant to intimidate, to reinforce the persona the family projected, but they were a lie. My hands were not cold; they were burning with a heat I tried to deny. A heat fueled by a conflict I had long tried to bury. My other hand tangled none too gently in her bleached hair, pulling her head back, exposing the vulnerable line of her throat. I leaned down, my lips brushing the frantic pulse beating there. A desperate rhythm, mirroring the thrum of my own heart—a heart that was slowly, irrevocably hardening under the weight of my choices.
She whimpered. And in that small, broken sound, I heard the echo of her despair. This was the price of her family’s survival. This was a consequence of her father’s actions.
I kissed her then, hard and demanding, as my tongue forced its way past her lips. This wasn’t affection. It was dominance. Power. A reminder of the transaction. A transaction her fatheragreed to, a deal struck in cold, hard cash, and yet, even now, as my mouth claimed hers, a cold knot of something akin to shame tightened in my gut.
I’d told myself this was purely business, a necessary reminder to her father about who truly controlled Chicago. But this... this felt like a betrayal not just of her, but of something deeper within myself, a buried code I thought I’d long since discarded. She submitted, her body going pliant in my grasp, her own tongue moving with rote skill.
One hand remained fisted in her hair; the other descended, sliding down her spine, over the swell of her ass, gripping the flimsy fabric of her thong. With a sharp tug, I ripped it away. The sound of tearing lace was obscenely loud. A sliver of my mind, the one I tried to drown out with ambition and necessity, recoiled.
