Chapter 1
Dr. Franklin Yates stood beside me in the private medical suite built into the east wing of my Chicago estate. Beyond the glass, Jonah and Blythe slept beneath white blankets, their bodies so thin that even breathing looked exhausting.
“We’ve exhausted the treatments their bodies can tolerate,” he said carefully. “Their counts aren’t recovering. Maybe ten days, Lawson.”
Ten days.
Men had begged me for their lives with steadier voices than his, yet I could not threaten this problem away. I only stared at Jonah’s weak fingers wrapped around his sister’s hand and remembered when those same hands raced toy cars through my marble hallways. Leukemia had taken their hair first, then their appetite, then their laughter. Now it was coming for everything I had left.
“Children surprise us sometimes,” Dr. Yates murmured.
I dismissed him with a nod because there was nothing else to say. Once the door closed, my phone buzzed with a message from Prescott Hale warning me that Crosby Vane’s scouts had been spotted near the south fence. Normally, that message would have demanded my immediate attention. Crosby had spent years circling my empire, waiting for weakness, but if my children died, Chicago itself could burn and I doubted I would care.
When I entered their room, Jonah opened his eyes.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.”
Blythe stirred and gave me a tiny smile that nearly broke what remained of me. Then she whispered, “Daddy, if I go first, can Jonah come with me?”
No gunshot had ever silenced a room like that sentence. I grabbed her hand too tightly before forcing myself to loosen my fingers. “Nobody is going anywhere, sweetheart.”
“Mommy went.”
Genevieve. Two years earlier, I had buried my wife beneath a gray October sky and given everyone watching exactly what they expected from Lawson Mercer—nothing. No tears, no weakness, no evidence that grief had driven itself into me like buried shrapnel.
Jonah tugged my sleeve. “If Bly gets scared tonight, can I sleep in her bed?”
“You can sleep wherever you want.”
Breakfast arrived later, but the twins barely touched it. By noon, my mansion had become silent enough to feel like a tomb, with servants whispering through corridors and armed guards moving as though noise itself might disturb death. The estate had been designed to survive enemies. Twelve-foot walls, hidden razor wire, cameras, bulletproof glass, an underground armory, a panic room, and enough armed men to defend a small fortress. None of it could defend Jonah and Blythe from their own blood.
At three, Prescott entered my office while I sat staring at files without reading a single word.
“She’s still at the gate.”
I looked up. “Who?”
“The applicant. Caregiver, nanny—whatever Odette called her.”
“We’re not hiring.”
“I already told her.”
“Then why is she still there?”
Prescott hesitated, and that alone caught my attention because the man rarely hesitated about anything. “She says she has nowhere else to go,” he replied. “No money. No family. Nothing but the clothes she’s wearing.”
My patience snapped. “Then send her away.”
Prescott remained standing. “What?”
His expression changed. “She also says she knows your children are dying.”
Every muscle in my body went still. Nobody outside this house was supposed to know that.
I stood up so fast my mahogany chair scraped loudly against the herringbone floor. “Bring her in. Through the secure perimeter. And search her twice.”
Ten minutes later, the heavy oak doors of my private study swung open, and Prescott escorted the applicant inside. Her name, according to the crumpled resume Odette had left on my desk earlier that week, was Nora Hayes. But nothing on that piece of paper prepared me for the reality of her. She looked barely twenty-four, wearing a faded wool coat that was far too thin for the bitter Chicago wind, her hands shoved deep into her pockets. She had dark, wind-whipped hair framing a pale face, but it was her eyes that made me freeze—they weren't the eyes of a desperate beggar looking for handouts. They were eyes that had stared down their own brand of hell and refused to break.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve standing at the gates of a man who could have you buried in an unmarked quarry before sunset,” I said, my voice dropping into the low, dangerous register that usually made grown men wet themselves.
Nora didn't flinch. She didn't drop her gaze. She simply looked around my fortress of a study, taking in the weapon displays, the heavy oak, and the cold, terrifying aura I projected. “If you were going to kill me, Lawson Mercer, you wouldn't have invited me inside past the second gate,” she replied, her voice steady and clear. “And right now, you don't have time to play the crime lord. Your children are running out of seconds.”
Prescott’s hand instinctively drifted toward the Sig Sauer holstered beneath his suit jacket. “Boss, should I throw her out?”
“Wait,” I commanded, holding up a single finger. I walked around the massive mahogany desk, closing the distance between us until I towered over her by a foot. I could smell the faint scent of rain and cheap soap on her coat. “How do you know my children are dying? Who told you?”
“Nobody told me. I deduced it,” Nora said, lifting her chin. “The top oncology specialist in the Midwest, Dr. Franklin Yates, has been entering your estate through the service gates every morning at 6:00 AM for the past three weeks carrying confidential medical bags. You haven't left the east wing in four days. And the local black-market blood banks have experienced three encrypted emergency withdrawals matching your private medical suite’s registry. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Lawson Mercer’s invincible armor is cracking from the inside.”
Silence descended upon the study. Prescott looked at me with wide eyes, utterly shocked that an unknown civilian had unraveled our operational security with mere observation. I studied her face, searching for a wire, a badge, a hidden affiliation with Crosby Vane or any of my other syndicate enemies. But I found nothing except an aching, desperate sincerity.
“Why are you here, Miss Hayes?” I asked softly. “What do you want? Money? Protection? Name your price.”
“I don't want your blood money,” she said, her voice tightening with a sudden, fierce emotion that caught me completely off guard. “I want to save them. Because four years ago, a corrupt pharmaceutical trial run by men like the ones you deal with killed my little brother. I spent years studying pediatric cellular degeneration and experimental bone marrow regeneration. I know why Yates’s treatments are failing. He’s treating your children for standard leukemia. But they don't have leukemia, Mr. Mercer. They have a targeted, synthetic chimera mutation introduced into their cellular structure.”
The room tilted on its axis. Synthetic mutation?
“Explain,” I demanded, my hands clenching into fists at my sides.
“Your wife didn't die of a natural illness two years ago, did she?” Nora whispered, her eyes locking onto mine with devastating precision. “Genevieve Mercer was poisoned. And whoever killed her left the exact same genetic marker dormant inside your twins. It’s a slow-acting synthetic pathogen. Yates is flushing their systems with chemo when he should be purging the engineered proteins.”
For the first time in five years, the heavy, suffocating ice around my heart shattered completely. Genevieve wasn't taken by fate. She had been murdered. And my children were dying from the same assassin’s blade.
May you like
I looked at Nora Hayes—penniless, exhausted, standing in my fortress of guns and gold—and realized she was the only angel of death willing to drag my children back from the grave.
“You’re hired,” I said, my voice thick with a lethal, absolute vow. “Save my children, Miss Hayes. And I swear to you... I will burn the bastards who did this down to atomic dust.”
