Two years after a sniper’s bullet stole the use of my legs, everyone inside my estate had learned to fear me—nurses quit, therapists fled, and even armed men lowered their eyes when I entered a room. Then a new maid named Emma walked into my private wing, looked straight at the man everyone called a monster, and said, “Do you want me to stop working? Because if I stop, I don’t get paid.”

By late November, the war for Chicago’s underground could no longer be fought from a laptop.

The Moretti family had made their move. Two of my sanitation trucks had been firebombed on the Eisenhower Expressway, and Sal, the corrupt union rep, had officially stopped taking my calls. The street was bleeding, and Luke’s face grew darker with every passing day.

"We need a sit-down," Luke declared one evening as he stood in my private dining room. "Old man Moretti wants to meet at the neutral territory—the back room of St. Rocco's in Little Italy. He says he'll only deal with the boss."

"He wants to see if I can walk into the room," I said, slicing into a thick medium-rare fillet on my plate.

"He wants to see if you're alive," Luke corrected grimly. "If you don't show, he takes the docks by Friday. If he takes the docks, our turf in the West Loop collapses within a month."

I set my steak knife down. The polished silver clicked sharply against the porcelain.

"Prepare the armor-plated Cadillac," I said calmly. "And get the ramp installed on the side entrance of St. Rocco's."

"Danny..." Luke hesitated, looking toward the corner of the room where Emma was quietly clearing the side table. "Is that wise? You haven't been out in public since the hospital."

"I am the head of this family," I growled, looking up at him with cold, dead eyes. "If Mario Moretti wants to look at a king in a wheelchair, I'll give him the show. But he'll leave that room knowing that my hands still work."

That night, after Luke left to coordinate the security detail, I stayed in my study until two in the morning.

I was sitting in my chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror, trying to master the art of transferring myself from the wheelchair to a standard restaurant booth without looking clumsy. It was a humiliating, agonizing process. My shoulder muscles burned, my breath came in ragged gasps, and every failed attempt ended with my lower body sliding awkwardly off the leather cushion onto the rug.

"Let me help," a voice came from the doorway.

Emma was standing there, wearing a thick grey sweater over her uniform. She walked into the room, holding a roll of medical grip-tape and a pair of hard-soled leather braces she had found in my medical storage closet.

"I don't need help," I grunted, pushing myself up off the floor using the chair's footrests, sweat pouring into my eyes.

"Yes, you do," she said softly, kneeling beside me. She pulled my trousers up slightly, wrapping the heavy leather braces around my calves and ankles, securing them tight with double-stitched velcro straps. "These will lock your ankle joints. It won't give you feeling back, but it'll keep your feet from turning inward when you transfer. It gives you a stable base."

I watched her hands as she worked—fast, efficient, gentle.

"You're very good at this," I noted quietly.

"My mother lost her mobility before she lost her mind," Emma said, not looking up as she pulled the second strap tight. "I spent two years lifting her in and out of the bathtub before the debt got too bad and I had to place her in the facility."

She looked up at me, her face inches from mine. In the dim light of the study lamp, I could see the tiny flecks of gold in her grey eyes.

"You're not a monster, Danny," she whispered. "A monster doesn't pay for an old woman's nursing home when he doesn't have to."

"I am a violent man, Emma," I warned her, my voice dropping into a dangerous register. "I have ordered things that would make you sick to your stomach. The money that pays for your mother's bed was taken from men who would cut my throat if they had the chance."

"I don't care about those men," she said fiercely, her fingers tightening on my knee. "I care about the man who sits in this room in the dark, trying to learn how to sit in a chair so his enemies don't see him break."

Before I could process her words, a deafening explosion shattered the quiet of the night.

The glass of the floor-to-ceiling conservatory windows blew inward with a horrific, roaring crack. A shower of razor-sharp shards rained across the room, shredding the drapes and tearing into the antique wallpaper.

The concussive wave threw Emma backward onto the hardwood floor.

Automatic gunfire erupted from the driveway below.

"Get down!" I roared, my instincts taking over instantly.

I threw my weight sideways out of the wheelchair, collapsing onto the floor beside Emma. I grabbed her by the thick collar of her sweater, dragging her body beneath the heavy, solid-oak desk just as a spray of 9mm rounds chewed through the plaster walls above our heads, sending clouds of white dust cascading over us.

"Danny!" she screamed, covering her head as glass continued to rain down.

"Stay down!" I reached under the desk drawer, hitting the hidden release button. The steel panel dropped, exposing the Sig Sauer .45 and three spare magazines.

I racked the slide with a heavy, satisfying clack.

Down the corridor, heavy boots were hammering against the floorboards. Shouting in Italian, followed by the deep, thunderous boom of Luke's 12-gauge shotgun, echoed through the house.

The Morettis hadn't waited for the sit-down at St. Rocco's. They had bought off someone at the front gate.

Two hitmen in dark tactical gear kicked open the study door, their submachine guns raised, sweeping the room.

From my position flat on my stomach beneath the oak desk, I didn't hesitate. I aligned the front sight of the .45 with the first shooter's chest and squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession.

The heavy hollow-point rounds hit him with brutal force, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the doorframe. The second shooter whirled toward the desk, but I fired twice more through the lower wooden paneling, catching him in the knees and stomach. He went down with a gurgling shriek.

Silence descended on the room, broken only by the hiss of smoke, the groan of the dying man in the doorway, and the heavy, frantic gasps of Emma huddled against my chest.

I pulled her closer, wrapping my heavy arm around her shoulders, holding her head against my collarbone as I kept the gun aimed at the door.

"Are you hit?" I demanded, my eyes sweeping her body for blood. "Emma! Look at me! Are you hit?"

She shook her head against my chest, her fingers clutching my shirt so tight I felt her nails through the fabric. "N-no. I don't think so."

The doorway filled with a dark silhouette. I raised the gun—

"It's me! It's Luke!" my second-in-command yelled, stepping over the fallen shooter, his shotgun smoking in his hand. His face was covered in soot, blood dripping from a cut on his hairline. "The gate was hit by two SUV units! We killed four of them, two got away!"

Luke stopped, looking at the floor beneath the desk.

I was lying flat on the rug, my legs stretched out uselessly behind me, my left arm wrapping Emma protectively against my side, my right hand holding a smoking .45 with terrifying precision.