At 5 A.M., Chicago’s Most Feared Man Came Home Smelling Like His Mistress—His Wife and Premature Twins Were Gone

Back in Chicago, the penthouse temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees the moment Sylvia Vance stepped out of the private elevator.

She had arrived in an emerald green fur-trimmed wrap, her black hair pinned up in loose, calculated curls, looking every inch the high-society interior decorator who had successfully positioned herself into the bed of the city’s undisputed king.

"Victor?" she called out, stepping into the gallery. She shook a dusting of snowflakes from her designer sleeves. "Darling, what on earth is happening? Two of your men practically dragged me out of my apartment. They wouldn't let me grab my purse, they wouldn't tell me—"

She stopped dead.

Victor was standing in the middle of the kitchen, his back to her.

He was no longer wearing his overcoat. He had stripped down to his white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his hands resting flat against the edge of the kitchen island.

Between his hands sat an empty infant bottle.

"Victor?" Sylvia’s voice lost its manufactured sweetness, a sliver of real unease creeping into her tone. "Where are the staff? Where is Nora?"

Victor turned around.

Sylvia took an instinctive step backward.

Victor looked like a corpse that had been pulled from an icy river. His skin was gray, his dark eyes hollowed out by a terrifying, dead stillness. The charm, the urbane sophistication, the magnetic confidence that had drawn her to him were completely gone. What remained was the street-level predator who had put three rival capos in shallow graves before his twenty-fifth birthday.

"You called her," Victor said.

The sentence wasn't a question. It fell into the room like a block of concrete.

Sylvia swallowed hard, her throat bobbing. She forced a light, dismissive laugh that sounded brittle and hollow. "What? Who? Victor, you’re not making any sense. I haven't spoken to your wife since the charity gala at the Art Institute last November—"

Victor was across the room before she could draw her next breath.

He didn't hit her. He didn't touch her skin. But he moved with such blinding, terrifying speed that Sylvia gasped, her back slamming against the elevator frame as his hand crashed into the wall three inches from her ear.

The scent of her cherry-blossom lotion—the exact scent that had been on his skin when he walked through the door at five in the morning—billowed up between them.

Victor felt a wave of disgust so violent it nearly doubled him over. He realized, with sudden, blinding clarity, how cheap she was. How transparent. He had traded a woman of grace, a woman who had bled for his children, a woman who had loved him before he had the high-rise and the private planes, for an ambitious socialite who smelled like synthetic flowers and looked at him like an investment portfolio.

"Marco pulled the secondary metadata from the tower near your apartment," Victor whispered, his voice dropping so low it was almost drowned out by the wind outside. "A disposable burner phone registered two miles from your building sent a twenty-second video to Nora’s phone yesterday afternoon. At two-fifteen. Exactly when you and I were ordering lunch at the Drake."

Sylvia’s face went pasty white. The foundation on her skin couldn't hide the sudden, terror-induced sweat that broke out along her hairline.

"Victor... please... she was going to find out anyway," Sylvia stammered, her voice shaking uncontrollably. "You were never going to leave her. You kept telling me to wait, telling me you had to manage the family image, that the babies were too fragile... She deserved to know that you didn't love her anymore! I did you a favor!"

"You did me a favor?" Victor repeated.

He stepped back. He looked at her as if she were a roach crawling across his pristine marble floor.

"Nora is out there in a blizzard," Victor said, his words measured, slow, lethal. "With my son, whose lungs collapse if the temperature drops below freezing. With my daughter, who weighs six pounds. Because you wanted to force my hand."

"Victor, listen to me—"

"Get out."

Sylvia blinked, stunned. "What?"

"Get out of my building. Get out of my city." Victor turned his back on her, walking back toward the kitchen counter. "You have until noon. At twelve-oh-one, every lease you hold in Chicago will be terminated. Your bank accounts will be flagged for forensic tax evasion. If your name appears on a single property title, business registry, or restaurant reservation in this state after sundown, Marco will handle you himself."

"You can't do that!" Sylvia shrieked, panic finally shattering her composure. "I know people, Victor! I know what you do! I know about the warehouse in Cicero, I know about—"

Victor didn't even turn around.

"Marco," he said quietly.

From the shadows of the secondary hallway, Marco stepped into the foyer. He held Sylvia’s designer purse in one hand and her heavy wool coat in the other. His expression was completely blank.

"Miss Vance," Marco said politely, his voice devoid of warmth. "The elevator is waiting. I suggest you walk quickly. The snow is getting worse."

Sylvia looked from Marco to Victor’s rigid, motionless back. She realized, in that second, that she had gambled everything on the assumption that Victor Rinaldi was a man driven by vanity. She had failed to realize that men like Victor were driven by possession.

And by taking his family away, she hadn't made herself his future.

She had made herself nothing.

She grabbed her coat from Marco’s hands and stepped backward into the elevator, sobbing in choked, furious gasps as the brass doors slid shut.

Once the elevator descended, silence settled back over the penthouse.

Victor picked up the empty baby bottle from the counter. He squeezed the flexible silicone nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

A memory hit him—sharp, uninvited, devastating.

Two weeks ago. Nora had been sitting on the floor of the nursery at three in the morning, her eyes swollen with exhaustion, singing an old Italian lullaby his own grandmother used to sing. She had looked up at him as he stood in the doorway, checking his watch because he had a meeting with a supplier at four.

*“You don’t have to stay, Victor,”* she had said softly. Not with anger. With pity. *“We know how busy you are.”*

He had thought she was being accommodating. He had thought she was acknowledging his importance, his status as the provider, the protector of the family empire.

Now, he realized the truth.

She hadn't been accommodating him.

She had been letting him go. She had been detaching herself, piece by piece, like an astronaut cutting the tether to an oxygen tank that had gone poisonous.

"Where did you go, Nora?" he whispered to the empty room. "Where the hell did you go?"

The phone on the counter buzzed.

Victor snatched it up. "Tell me."

"We caught a break," Marco said, his voice coming through the speaker with renewed urgency. "A private clinic off Route 30 in Aurora. A pediatrician named Vance—no relation to Sylvia—just called in an emergency refill report for specialized pediatric surfactant. The system flagged the national batch code. It’s the exact medical prescription issued to Leo Rinaldi by Northwestern Memorial."

Victor’s heart hammered against his ribs. "Is she there?"

"The script was called in two hours ago from an anonymous VoIP line, but the pickup was scheduled for an independent farm pharmacy in DeKalb. The snow has blocked the secondary roads, but my team is five miles out."

"Call them off," Victor barked, grabbing his leather jacket from the barstool.

"What? Victor, if we wait—"

"I said call them off!" Victor roared into the receiver, his voice echoing through the hollow rooms of the penthouse. "If you send six armed men in black Suburbans to surround a pharmacy with my sick son inside, she’ll bolt again. Or she’ll die trying to get away. I’m going alone."

"Victor, the storm is at category two—"

"I don't care if the sky falls, Marco! Bring my car around to the front. Now!"