We shove through the swinging double doors into the kitchen. The cooks are all standing around in confusion, having heard the commotion out in the dining room, but not knowing what the fuck is going on.

“Clear out!” Cal shouts at them.

They spook like deer, dashing out into the alleyway behind the restaurant.

Cal pulls his gun out of his suit jacket, and I do the same with the one I’m wearing on a holster under my shirt. Cal’s in a tactical stance, covering the entrance to the kitchen. I do the same with the exit.

“Do you want to stay in here?” Cal asks me.

“Let’s get the fuck out before the cops come,” I tell him.

There’s a chance that another shooter has the back covered, but I doubt it. I think we’re dealing with the same motherfucker from the rally. A lone wolf.

To be sure, I pull on a white chef’s coat and I go out the back door, quickly scanning the rooftops on both sides of the alley to make sure we’re clear. Then I cover the door from behind the trash bins while Cal and Aida come out.

We hustle down the alley to the restaurant’s catering van. The keys are tucked under the sun visor, so it takes us all of five seconds to steal it. We roar down the alleyway, metal catering trays rattling around in the back.

“What the fuck was that!” Aida shouts, as we turn onto Franklin street.

“That was a fucking sniper,” Cal says through gritted teeth. I can tell he’s furious—and not because someone just tried to kill him. I think it’s because this is the second time that shooting has happened within ten feet of his pregnant wife.

“You’re going out of town until we find this asshole,” he says to Aida.

“No way!” Aida shouts. “I’m not—”

“This isn’t up for debate!” Cal roars. His body is stiff with fury, while his blue eyes are ice cold. “I’m not taking the chance of you getting hurt, or the baby.”

“I’m staying with you,” Aida tells him stubbornly.

“That’s the worst place you could be,” Cal says.

And that’s when I understand the same thing that Callum just realized. The sniper was never shooting at Yafeu Solomon. He was aiming for Cal all along. Cal was right behind Solomon on the stage. That bullet was meant for my brother-in-law.

“Who the fuck is this guy?” I mutter to Cal.

His eyes are narrowed and ferocious. “That’s exactly what I want to know,” he says.

I drive us east along the river, thinking.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that the sniper waited for Cal and me to eat lunch together before he took another shot.

This guy has a grudge against us. Both of us.

But why . . .

I try to run through our list of mutual enemies. We definitely pissed the Russians off. After their last boss took a shot at Cal’s little sister, Fergus Griffin plugged him with a full clip and left him to bleed out on the floor of the ballet.

On top of that, Nero stole a diamond from their safe deposit box at Alliance Bank—though I’m not sure if they know about that yet. The stone was a national treasure, stolen from the Hermitage Museum by the Bratva, before we relieved them of it.

That diamond funded our South Shore project. We traded it to a Greek shipping magnate for cold, hard cash. I like to think that whole deal was done under the table, but the truth is that a 40-carat blue diamond is never going to remain entirely secret. It’s too tempting to brag about, and too easy to trace.

The Bratva are prideful and vicious. If they know what we did, they’ll want revenge.

But a sniper isn’t exactly their style. They like violent, bloody, graphic retribution. Something horrifying. Something that sends a message. Nothing as quick or painless as a 50-caliber bullet to the skull.

This hit was personal.

The bullet was aimed at Cal, but the message was for me. I stopped the first sniper shot because I saw his flags. This time, he didn’t want me to see anything. He wanted my brother-in-law’s head to explode right next to me, without me noticing anything at all. He wanted me to feel the guilt and shame of failure. He wanted to prove that he’s better than me.

But why?

That’s what I’m wondering when I take Cal and Aida over to the Griffin mansion on the Gold Coast. Cal wants to talk to his father, and he thinks Aida will be safer there, surrounded by a full security team.

I want to use their computer.

I call Nero and tell him to meet us there. I’m not bad with research, but Nero’s a fucking genius. He can break into places he has no business being—usually the databases that store blueprints and security schematics.

He pulls into the Griffins’ drive at almost the same time as us, jumping out of his Mustang. His hair looks wind-blown and messy, though he didn’t have the top down, and he’s tucking his t-shirt back into his jeans.

“Did I interrupt something?” I ask him.

“Yes, you did,” Nero says coolly. “So this better be important.”

“It is,” Aida tells him. “Someone’s trying to kill Cal.”

“Someone besides you?” Nero says.

“This isn’t funny!” Aida snaps, fists balled at her sides. I wouldn’t believe unless I saw it myself, but I think there might be tears in the corners of her bright gray eyes.

Nero looks similarly taken aback. If Aida can’t see the humor in a situation, then it really must be serious.

We go into the Griffins’ mansion, which is massive, ultra-modern, and located right on the rim of the lake, with a widespread view of the water.

“What’s going on?” Imogen Griffin says, watching us all pour into her kitchen.

While Cal explains the situation to his mother, Nero and I go upstairs to Callum’s old office. He’s still got a full computer rig up there, but only one office chair.

“You take that one,” Nero says, nodding toward the minuscule armchair on the other side of the desk. It looks like it was made for a twelve-year-old.

“I’m not gonna fit in that one.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to, because I need a decent chair to work.”

“You need the right chair to type?”

“It’s not just typing,” Nero says, glowering at me. “That’s why I’m doing it and you’re not. If it was just typing, then you could sit right here and Google away.”

“Fine.” I scowl, leaning against the wall with my arms crossed.

“Quit sulking, or I’ll send you to make a sandwich, too,” Nero says.

“Try it, and see what happens,” I growl.

Nero starts clicking away on the keys. It does look like fucking typing, but I get his point. It takes him about twenty minutes to access the military records I asked him to find.

“I want all the top snipers from the last ten years,” I tell him.

Nero finds the data, printing it out on several sheets of paper.

While I scan down the lists of names, deployments, and commendations, Nero starts searching for recent sniper school graduates.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for. Some of the names I recognize—guys that I was deployed with in Iraq, or that I knew by reputation. There’s a certain level of competition between snipers in various units. If somebody was setting themselves apart, making a name for themselves, you were sure to hear about it, even if you weren’t fighting in the same area, or even deployed at the same time.