A seven-year-old boy stopped me outside school and asked me to walk him home because “nobody believes me.” He had no idea I was Dante Moretti—known in certain circles as “The Wolf,” the man who controlled half the city’s underground empire—but when he opened his front door, I recognized something inside that house connected to a betrayal my organization had been hunting for years.

The rain had turned into a steady, freezing sleet by nine o'clock.

Inside an abandoned auto repair shop three miles from the docks, the air smelled of engine oil, old rubber, and gun grease. Six men sat around a rusting metal table, illuminated by a single halogen work light hooked to an overhead beam.

These were not the young, high-tech mercenaries Marco had hired over the past five years. These were the old guard—men in their late forties and fifties, scarred veterans of my father’s era who had retired into quiet civilian lives when I consolidated power.

When Vincent Caruso called them an hour ago, every single one of them had picked up their gear and driven through the storm without asking a single question.

"Marco has twenty men at the silos," said Leo Vance—no relation to Arthur Vance, but an old-school tracker who managed our docks in the nineties. He spread a blueprinted map across the hood of a dusty sedan. "They’ve set up snipers on the catwalks at fifty feet. The boy is being held in the central control room on the third level."

I stood at the head of the table, checking the action on my assault rifle. "We aren't waiting for midnight."

"Dante," Vincent said, stepping beside me with a cup of black coffee. "Marco expects us to attack from the river side. He’s got heavy caliber machine guns mounted on the barge docks."

"Then we don't use the river," I said, pointing a gloved finger at the blueprint. "The old coal tunnels underneath the complex were sealed in 1982. The city maps don't show them, but my father used those tunnels to run industrial whiskey during the prohibition era."

Leo grinned, revealing a gold-capped tooth. "The iron gate under the second silo?"

"Still there," I nodded. "We split into two teams. Vincent, you take Leo and two men through the main gate. Make as much noise as possible. Draw their snipers toward the northern yard."

"And you?" Vincent asked.

"I’m going up the coal shaft alone," I said, my eyes cold and fixed on the map. "I’m getting Owen out before Marco even knows I’m inside the building."

Vincent reached out and grabbed my forearm, his grip firm and unyielding. "Dante. Marco is mine. He used my family. He used my sister’s house."