Six hours before anyone expected me home, I walked into my Long Island mansion with a loaded gun under my coat, another man’s blood drying on my cuff, and the kind of reputation that made armed men look at the floor when I entered a room.

At six o'clock the next morning, as the orange sunrise broke over the Atlantic horizon, I stood on the porch of the Montauk house.

Grace walked out, wearing an oversized wool jacket I had given her, holding two cups of fresh coffee.

"You're going back," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I have to," I replied, turning to look at her. "As long as those men in Brooklyn are breathing, my daughters will never be truly safe. I have to close this book forever."

Grace set the cups down on the wooden railing. She stepped right in front of me, reaching up to adjust the lapel of my heavy coat.

"Promise me you'll come back," Grace said, her grey eyes searching mine with intense urgency. "No more ghosts, Dominic. No more blood money. Finish it, and come home to us."

Come home to us.

The words echoed in my chest like a sacred vow.

"I promise," I said softly.

I leaned down and kissed her. It wasn't a hasty kiss; it was deep, fierce, and filled with every emotion I had buried since the day Isabelle died. Grace leaned into me, her hands clutching my chest, kissing me back with a passionate intensity that sealed the promise between us.

When I pulled back, she smiled, a beautiful, breathless smile that lit up the misty morning.

"Go," she whispered. "We'll be waiting."

Three hours later, I walked into an abandoned warehouse in the Red Hook shipping yards of Brooklyn.

Luca and twenty of my most loyal soldiers stood in a circle around a central chair illuminated by a single overhead spotlight.

Tied to the chair was Don Carmine Moretti—the seventy-year-old head of the Brooklyn syndicate—along with Victor and the corrupt police captain from Garden City who had delayed the response time on the morning of Isabelle's murder.

When Carmine saw me walk out of the shadows, his arrogant mask shattered.

"Dominic," Carmine rasped, his voice trembling. "Listen to me... it was business! Just business! We can make a deal! Half the shipping ports—"

"Fourteen months ago," I said, my voice echoing through the massive empty warehouse like a divine judgment, "you ordered a hit outside a preschool."

"It was Victor!" Carmine pointed a shaking finger at Victor beside him. "Victor told us she was going to the feds!"

"She was going to me," I corrected him calmly, pulling my weapon from my holster. "She was my wife. And those children were my life."

I looked at Luca. "Hand everything over to the Federal Special Task Force. The recordings, the offshore bank ledgers, the wiretaps. Let the government tear their empire down to the bedrock."

Carmine blinked in disbelief. "You're... you're giving it to the feds? You aren't going to kill us?"

"Death is too fast for you, Carmine," I said coldly. "You're going to spend the rest of your miserable lives in a maximum-security federal facility, watching everything you built burn to ashes, while the world forgets your names."

I turned my back on them, walking out toward the sunlight streaming through the open warehouse bay doors.

"Luca," I called over my shoulder.

"Yes, boss?"

"I'm retiring," I declared, tossing my encrypted phone into the dark waters of the harbor. "The organization is dissolved. Distribute the legitimate shipping assets among the men. I'm done."