THE BLIND HEIR OF CHICAGO: BLOODLINES, BULLETS, AND THE ART OF WAR

I ascended the central iron staircase to the command platform, my boots clanging against the steel steps.

Marcus Vance was on his knees, blood trickling from his ears, but his eyes were filled with feral desperation. As I reached the top platform, he pulled an emergency detonator from his tactical vest.

"If I die, this entire silo goes into the river!" Vance snarled, his thumb hovering over the red arming switch. "I have twenty barrels of C4 rigged to the foundation!"

I raised my Kimber .45, but Vance’s personal enforcer—a massive, seven-foot juggernaut armed with a combat axe—charged out from behind the control console, slamming into my chest with the force of a freight train.

My gun flew over the railing, clattering down into the abyss below. The enforcer slammed me onto the steel grating, wrapping his massive hands around my throat, cutting off my oxygen. I drove my thumbs into his eyes, but his grip was iron. Dark spots began dancing across my vision.

"Shoot him, Evelyn!" I choked out.

"I can't!" Evelyn's voice came over the comms, breathless and strained. "I have three hostiles pinning me down on the west catwalk!"

Vance laughed maniacally, standing over me with the detonator. "It ends here, Julian!"

Suddenly, the soft, rhythmic click of bare feet sounded across the metal gantry.

Grace stepped onto the platform.

The wind from the open silo roof whipped her dark hair around her face, her pale eyes calm and unblinking amidst the chaos.

"Get away from my father," Grace said quietly.

The giant enforcer let go of my throat with one hand, laughing as he reached out to crush Grace's skull like an eggshell. "Stupid blind brat—"

Grace didn't flinch. She heard the shift in his balance, the rustle of his heavy tactical vest, and the exact trajectory of his sweeping arm.

She ducked underneath his reach with blinding speed. Her left hand drove a high-voltage tactical taser straight into the nerve cluster beneath his armpit, unleashing fifty thousand volts of pure electrical fury directly into his nervous system.

The giant convulsed violently, his muscles seizing. Before he could recover, Grace spun with the full rotational force of her body and drove her reinforced baton straight into his kneecap with a bone-shattering crack.

The enforcer roared in agony, collapsing backward over the low safety railing. He plummeted four stories down into the dark waters of the Calumet River.

Vance stared in horror at my twelve-year-old daughter. In his panic, his thumb slammed down on the detonator.

Nothing happened.

Evelyn appeared on the overhead beam, holding the severed main detonation cable in her bloodied hand. "Looking for this?"

Vance backed away toward the edge of the platform, his face contorted in sheer terror. "What are you people?!"

I stood up, wiping the blood from my mouth, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Grace and Evelyn.

"We are the Caruso family," I said.

Grace stepped forward, raising her baton and pointing it directly at Vance's chest. "And you are trespassing in our city."

Vance reached for his backup pistol, but I moved first, delivering a crushing right hook that knocked him unconscious across the steel floorboards, right into the waiting hands of the arriving federal agents Helena had secretly alerted through encrypted channels before the final raid.