Thirty-seven of the most dangerous people in Chicago were watching when Adrian Vale looked straight at me and said,

The whiteout outside was absolute.

I kicked open the rusted metal emergency exit, dragging Adrian into the roaring teeth of the storm. The sub-zero wind hit our faces like a physical fist, instantly numbing the hot blood soaking through Adrian’s side.

He was losing consciousness. His heavy frame was dragging in the snow, his head lolling against my shoulder.

"Adrian, stay with me!" I screamed into the howling wind, my boots sinking twelve inches into the drifts. "Look at me! Adrian!"

His eyelids fluttered, his dark eyes unfocused. "Mara... take the car... leave me... Markus will find you..."

"Shut up!" I cried, tears freezing to my cheeks. "Shut up and walk! You promised me I wasn't sleeping alone tonight! You don't get to break that promise!"

Through the swirling blizzard, twenty yards ahead, the Humvee’s headlights suddenly flashed twice.

The door flew open. Markus emerged, his assault rifle slung across his chest, sprinting through the deep snow toward us.

"Boss!" Markus roared, his eyes widening in horror as he saw the blood soaking Adrian’s side. He scooped Adrian up by his tactical harness, lifting most of the dead weight, while I held Adrian’s head upright.

Together, we hauled him into the back of the Humvee. Markus slammed the heavy armored doors shut, instantly muffling the screams of the storm.

"He took a close-range shotgun blast to the lower left flank," I gasped, my hands covered in Adrian’s blood as I ripped open his torn sweater. "The ballistic vest took the center mass of the spread, but the shrapnel shredded his lower ribs! It’s bleeding arterial red!"

Markus hit the gas, the Humvee’s heavy tires tearing through the snowdrifts as we fishtailed out of the harbor terminal. "We can't take him to Northwestern Memorial! Crowe has state police monitoring every emergency room in the city!"

"Then where do we go?!" I shouted, pressing a roll of sterile gauze from the emergency kit directly into the wound. Adrian groaned, his entire body convulsing with agony as my palms bore down on the lacerated tissue.

"Safehouse Charlie," Markus answered grimly, looking in the rearview mirror as he navigated the blinding whiteout. "We have a trauma surgeon on retainer out there. But it’s forty-five minutes on icy roads."

"He doesn't have forty-five minutes!" I cried. "He’s going into hypovolemic shock!"

I grabbed the field trauma kit from the floorboards, tearing open the packages with my teeth. I had never gone to medical school, but six years of keeping Ethan alive through broken bones, ruptured appendices, and freight yard lacerations had taught me basic trauma triage.

"Adrian, listen to my voice," I begged, leaning down until my mouth was inches from his ear. "I’m going to pack the wound with hemostatic gauze. It’s going to burn like fire. You hold on to me. You hold on to me, do you hear me?"

He couldn't speak, but his large, bloody hand weakly reached up and found my wrist, gripping it with the last shred of his strength.

I shoved the combat gauze directly into the bleeding cavity.

Adrian arched off the leather seat, a guttural scream of pure agony tearing from his throat before his head fell back and his eyes rolled into his head. He went completely limp.

"Adrian!" I screamed, tears raining onto his pale face.

I checked his neck. His pulse was thready, fluttering like the wing of a dying bird, but it was there. The bleeding began to slow as the clotting agents in the gauze reacted with his blood.

For the next forty minutes, I didn't let go of him. I wrapped my own body around his shivering frame, using my coat and my own body heat to keep him from slipping into hypothermia. I whispered to him continuously through the dark, telling him about the spreadsheets, about the numbers, about the life we were going to build when this nightmare was over.

"You said you wanted to balance the ledger, Adrian," I whispered into his hair, my voice cracking with exhaustion. "We have the drive. We have everything. You have to live to see her fall."

When the Humvee finally skidded through the heavy iron gates of Safehouse Charlie—a secluded, heavily fortified compound nestled deep in the snowy woods outside Rockford—six armed guards swarmed the vehicle with a stretcher.

The doors were ripped open.

"Get him onto the gurney! Move! Move!" a man in surgical scrubs shouted.

Ethan was there.

"Mara!" Ethan cried, running through the snow in his work boots, catching me as I tumbled out of the Humvee, my clothes soaked in blood, my body shivering violently from shock. "Mara, oh my God, are you hit?!"

"I’m fine," I sobbed, collapsing against my little brother’s chest as the guards wheeled Adrian away toward the estate’s lower medical bay. "It’s Adrian... Ethan, they shot him..."

Ethan held me tightly, his own eyes wide with shock and fury, his strong arms wrapping around me just as I had held him for a decade.

"He saved you," Ethan whispered fiercely into my hair. "Markus told me what he did at the docks. He took the bullet for you."

I pulled back, looking toward the brightly lit doorway where the medical team had disappeared with the man who owned my heart.

I wiped the blood from my face, turned back to the Humvee, and retrieved the titanium master drive from the floorboard.

The terror in my chest was gone. The fear that had kept me invisible for eighteen months had burned away in the freezing snow of the freight yard, replaced by a cold, incandescent rage that rivaled the winter gale outside.

"Ethan," I said, my voice dangerously calm.

"Yeah, Mara?"

"Bring me a satellite terminal, three cups of black coffee, and an open line to the Department of Justice."

I looked down at the titanium drive in my hand.