Rain pounded against the mansion glass when the baby monitor hissed to life with five terrifying words:

The cold rain hit us like a wall of buckshot the moment our boots cleared the terrace.

The estate grounds were swallowed in an absolute, suffocating blackout. The halogen perimeter floodlights that usually bathed the six-foot stone walls in brilliant white were dead, killed by someone who understood the high-voltage breaker systems inside the main gatehouse. The only illumination came from the violent, jagged arcs of lightning cutting across the Atlantic, illuminating the ancient, thrashing oak trees in stark monochrome flashes.

Damen didn't let go of my wrist. His grip was an iron band, bruising the skin down to the bone, hauling me across the manicured lawn that had dissolved into ankle-deep, freezing mud.

"Damen, let me go, I can run faster!" I screamed over the shriek of the gale, salt spray and rain stinging my eyes until I was half-blind.

"Stay behind my shoulder!" he roared back, his voice stripped of every trace of patrician refinement, sounding feral, wild, and desperate. "He doesn't miss, Nora! If he has a rifle set on the arbor, you won't hear the round that takes your head off!"

"Who is Julian?!" I yelled, stumbling through the thorn bushes as we entered the pine woods separating the main manor from the caretaker’s cottage. "You told me your brother died when the yacht went down in ninety-eight! You told the state police you were the last Cross alive!"

Damen didn't answer. His boots tore through the undergrowth, branches whipping across his chest, the heavy suppressed .45 leveled at the darkness ahead. In the strobing glare of a lightning strike, I saw the side of his face. Sweat was mixing with the downpour, his jaw locked so tight the muscle looked ready to tear through the skin.

Ahead of us, through the weeping willows, the caretaker’s stone cottage sat like a squat, dark mausoleum.

The lights were out. Every single window was pitch-black.

The front door, which I had double-bolted with an American-made brass deadbolt two hours earlier before reporting to the main manor for night cleaning, hung open on its heavy iron hinges. It swung slowly in the gusting nor'easter, the rusted hinges groaning with a rhythmic, sickening cadence: creak... thud... creak.

Damen reached the threshold first. He flattened his back against the stone facade, his weapon raised beside his temple. He didn't check the door; he used his shoulder to ease it wide, his tactical flashlight snapping on with a blinding, five-hundred-lumen beam that sliced through the darkness of my living room.

I broke from the elm tree two seconds behind him, ignoring the burning agony in my lungs, heedless of the mud caking my shoes.

I burst through the door into the pitch-black living room.

"Toby!"

"Nora, get down!" Damen hissed, his arm shooting out like an iron bar to block my chest, forcing me behind his broad frame.

The living room was undisturbed. The worn corduroy sofa sat against the wall; Toby’s wooden train tracks were still assembled on the braided rug. The smell was wrong, though. It didn't smell like lemon soap or baby lotion.

It smelled of clean rain, gun oil, and the sharp, expensive aroma of cloves and Turkish tobacco.

Damen’s flashlight tracked across the pine floorboards. There, directly in the center of the kitchen threshold, were muddy boot prints—heavy, lugged combat soles, size eleven. They led in one direction: down the short hallway toward the bedroom.

My breath hitched in my throat, a suffocating knot of agony closing around my windpipe. I shoved Damen’s arm down with desperate, feral strength and broke into the bedroom.

The crib stood against the far wall, beneath the open window where lace curtains whipped violently in the storm.

"Toby!" I sobbed, collapsing against the wooden railing.

The crib was empty.

The fleece dinosaur blanket was folded with mathematical precision at the foot of the mattress. Resting squarely in the center of the white sheet was the battered plush fox with the missing button eye.

And resting on top of the fox was a second silver pocket watch.

Damen stepped into the nursery, his boots heavy on the floorboards. When the beam of his flashlight locked onto the crib, the silence that fell over him was more frightening than any gunfire. He slowly reached down and lifted the silver watch from the toy's chest.

He clicked the latch open with his thumb.

Inside the silver lid, engraved with microscopic, exquisite skill, were four lines of text:

“To my little fox.

The blood cannot be hidden in the dirt.

Midnight at Pier Nine.

Come alone, Brother.”

Damen turned the watch over. On the back, freshly scratched into the metal with the point of a tactical knife, was a small, crudely drawn smiling fox.

"Where is my baby?" I screamed, grabbing Damen’s lapels with both hands, shaking him with all the strength left in my body. Tears streamed down my cheeks, hot and bitter against the freezing rain soaking my hair. "Who took my son?! You know him! You knew that name! What does he want with Toby?!"

Damen looked down at me. The ruthless, untouchable mafia boss, a man who had built an empire on corpses and silence, had eyes that were hollowed out by an ancient, rotting wound.

"His name is Julian Cross," Damen said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that barely competed with the howling storm outside. "He was my older brother. He was supposed to inherit the syndicate six years ago."

"Supposed to?" I cried, my fingernails digging into his soaked suit fabric. "What happened to him?!"

"I executed him," Damen whispered. "I shot him three times in the chest on the deck of our father's yacht off Nantucket and watched him sink into fifty fathoms of black water."