Chapter 1 - The Bloodhound’s Scent
The rain beating against the shattered glass of Penny Abbott’s kitchen window smelled of sulfur, wet asphalt, and autumn rot. Chicago was shivering under an unseasonable freeze, but inside the fourth-floor walk-up in Lincoln Park, the air had turned dead and dry.
Declan Hayes did not blink. He stared at the silver wolf’s head resting against the black nitrile of Leo’s gloved palm. The tiny sapphires embedded in the creature's eye sockets glittered like spiteful stars under the harsh glare of the utility flashlight.
“Julian Vance,” Declan murmured. His voice had dropped to a register that made the hair on the back of Leo’s neck stand up. It was not loud. Declan Hayes rarely shouted. True apex predators never needed to roar; they only needed to stop breathing through their noses and let the scent of blood lead them.
“Julian wears this set to every council gala,” Leo said, his jaw tightening until the muscle ticked. “Inherited from his old man. Custom-cast in Zurich. There isn’t another pair in North America.”
Declan didn’t reach for it. If he touched it, the cold metal would seal an execution warrant in his mind, and he wanted Julian Vance alive for at least forty-five minutes after he found him.
Declan stepped back through the ruins of Penny’s living room. His heavy Italian leather shoes crunched over fragments of a porcelain mug she used every morning—a pastel ceramic thing that held exactly fourteen ounces of hazelnut roast with three spoonfuls of raw sugar. She had bought it at an artisan fair in Michigan two summers ago. He knew that because she had kept the duplicate on her desk at the Hayes Tower, tucked neatly between her dual-monitor setup and her leather-bound planner.
She was twenty-eight years old, soft-spoken, and possessed a quiet, radiant dignity that made every hardened killer in the Hayes syndicate lower their eyes when they delivered documents to her desk. Men who had buried bodies in the Gary sand dunes brought Penny Abbott seasonal pastries because she always remembered their children’s names and never flinched at the scars on their knuckles.
And now her ribs were splintered, her scalp was stapled shut at Northwestern Memorial, and her blood had soaked into the cracked floorboards of an alley behind a bakery.
“Call Roman,” Declan commanded, his voice slicing through the static of the open storm window.
“Boss?” Leo looked up, startled. “Roman is running the South Side docks tonight. If we pull him—”
“I didn't say ask for his report. I said call him.” Declan turned slowly. In the gloom, his six-foot-four silhouette filled the narrow doorway, shoulders blocking out the hall light. His eyes, an icy, predatory gray, were entirely devoid of humanity. “Tell Roman that not a single cargo container leaves the Port of Chicago tonight. Tell him to ground the private airstrip at Gary. Put three men on every outbound train at Union Station. Tell the gate captains at O’Hare and Midway that if a private jet attempts to file a flight plan without my thumbprint on the clearance, they shoot the landing gear off.”
Leo’s breath caught. “Declan... that’s a full citywide quarantine. The Five Families will call an emergency summit within three hours. They’ll think the Feds are raiding.”
“Let them think God himself is coming down to audit them,” Declan whispered. He stepped over the overturned velvet sofa—the sofa where he had once sat with a cup of chamomile tea while she coughed through a chest cold, her voice raspy, her round face flushed pink as she told him he was being ridiculous for checking on her.
He had wanted to bury his hands in her thick, chestnut curls that night. He had wanted to press his mouth against the pulse racing at the base of her throat and tell her that without her voice in the outer office, the Hayes empire was nothing more than an empty tomb filled with money and ghosts.
Instead, he had stood up, adjusted his tie, told her to take three days off, and left fifty thousand dollars in cash tucked under her teapot so she wouldn’t stress about her younger sister’s university tuition.
“Declan,” Leo said cautiously, tucking the evidence bag into his coat. “The laptop. Her personal drive is gone, but the secondary external unit behind the baseboard... Vance’s dogs tore the room apart looking for it. They missed it because they’re scavengers, not pros.”
“Did she back it up?”
“Penny never leaves anything to chance,” Leo said softly. “You know that. She keeps an encrypted cold wallet mirror in the safety deposit box at First Illinois. But whatever she saw in the logistics ledgers last week... it terrified her enough to bring the raw data home.”
Declan walked toward the shattered window and looked down into the darkness of the alley. Rain lashed his face, cold and indifferent. Down there, between two commercial dumpsters, Penny had fought for her life against two, maybe three trained enforcers. She was not a small woman; she carried her curves with solid grace, and she had fought like a lioness. The defensive bruises on her forearms, the broken fingers on her right hand—the doctor had said she had inflicted severe trauma on her assailants before they overwhelmed her with a blunt instrument.
*She hurt them,* Declan thought, and a savage, feral pride tore through the agony in his chest. *My sweet girl broke their teeth before they took her down.*
“Leo.”
“Yes, boss?”
“Have the cleaners sterilize this apartment. Not a scrap of her clothing, not a single book, not one torn leaf from her plants remains here. Move everything to the penthouse in Gold Coast. If a single item is handled without velvet wrapping, I’ll take the hands off the man responsible.”
“Understood.”
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“And get my car.” Declan wiped a speck of soot from his lapel, his face settling into a mask of pure, marble-hewn terror. “We’re going to the hospital. If Penny Abbott so much as twitches toward the light, I am going to be the wall that blocks it.”
***
