The moment all three children stopped crying at exactly the same time, Adrien Moretti forgot how to breathe.

Men who try to flee a three-thousand-acre Westchester estate on foot during a torrential downpour rarely make it past the outer drainage ravines.

Twenty-five minutes after the lockdown order, Miller’s voice crackled over Adrien’s handheld radio.

“Boss! We got him. Sector Two drainage culvert near the old greenhouse. Marcus tried to scale the perimeter ditch, but he slipped in the mud. We’ve got him pinned.”

“Hold your fire,” Adrien replied coldly. “I’m on my way.”

Adrien vaulted into the driver’s seat of a reinforced all-terrain utility vehicle, slamming the gear into four-wheel drive and tearing across the slick lawn, churning up turf and mud in a shower of dark spray.

When he reached the greenhouse, the scene looked like a war zone.

Two security operatives had Marcus Vance pinned face-down in the wet clay near a concrete drainage pipe. Marcus’s tactical vest was caked in mud, his nose bleeding, his hands zip-tied tightly behind his back.

Adrien cut the engine, stepped out of the utility vehicle into the freezing rain, and walked slowly toward the captive.

He didn't shout. He didn't draw his pistol. He just walked with the slow, terrifying inevitability of an executioner.

Marcus raised his head, spitting a mixture of blood and rainwater out of his mouth. He looked up at Adrien with a pathetic, desperate grin.

“Well,” Marcus coughed, his voice raspy. “I always knew you were paranoid, Addy. Guess I should’ve run ten minutes earlier.”

Adrien stopped two feet away from him, looking down with eyes dead and black as obsidian.

“Ten years, Marcus,” Adrien said quietly, his voice barely carrying over the sound of the rain. “I pulled you out of a federal penitentiary in Prague. I gave you a salary, a home, a shield, and a family name to hide behind. And you sold my children to the highest bidder.”

“I didn't sell your kids,” Marcus spat back defiantly. “I just kept an ear open. You think you rule the world from this gilded cage, Moretti? You’re blind. You’ve been blind since Claire died.”

Adrien’s knee shot out with lightning speed, driving squarely into Marcus’s ribs with a sickening crack.

Marcus let out a muffled shriek of agony, collapsing back into the mud as the wind was knocked violently out of his lungs.

Adrien crouched down beside him, grabbing him by the soaked collar of his tactical vest and dragging his face inches from his own.

“What did you just say about Claire?” Adrien hissed, his voice trembling with a lethal, suppressed fury.

Marcus gasped for air, his face turning pale, fear finally piercing through his arrogant facade. “You... you think her crash on the Henry Hudson Parkway was an accident? You stupid bastard... Claire wasn't driving home from a boutique in Manhattan. She was meeting with federal investigators. She found out what your logistics network was really being used for by the board of directors.”

Adrien’s grip tightened until his knuckles turned white. “Lies.”

“Check the encrypted drive in my quarters!” Marcus choked out, coughing violently. “The financial ledgers! The board knew Claire was going to expose the syndicate’s drug-smuggling pipelines hidden inside your legitimate shipping containers. They didn't want to kill her—they wanted her to keep quiet. But when she threatened to take the kids and run... the brakes on her SUV were remotely modulated via the onboard computer network.”

The world around Adrien violently tilted on its axis.

The rain seemed to stop. The wind faded into a distant, roaring vacuum.

For eight months, he had mourned a tragic, random twist of fate. He had blamed bad weather, slick asphalt, and cruel luck for stealing his wife.

And all along, his own board of directors—the men he shared cigars with, the men he sat across from in polished mahogany boardrooms—had murdered the mother of his children.

And he had kept their secrets safe inside his fortress.

“Who on the board?” Adrien whispered, his voice dangerously low.

Marcus squeezed his eyes shut, a bloody smile touching his lips. “Too late, Addy. The packet was set on an automated timer. The moment my comms went dark tonight, all the evidence proving the board ordered Claire’s assassination was automatically beamed to every federal prosecutor, investigative journalist, and rival syndicate boss from New York to Geneva.”