The storm outside hadn’t let up for hours, thunder shaking the ground like distant gunfire. In the center of his office, I stood motionless, jaw clenched, staring at the burner phone in my hand. The last words still echoed in my ears.

“Your empire or your child. You’ve got until midnight.”

I would kill and be killed for my 2 year old daughter.

Behind me, my right-hand man, Niall, hovered anxiously. “Boss, if we pull out now, we lose the docks. We lose Spain. We lose everything.”

I didn’t respond. My knuckles were white around the phone. Every part of me burned to move—to act—to kill—but the weight of the choice pinned him still. My daughter’s smiling face flashed in his mind: gap-toothed, paint-smeared, laughing on her tricycle two mornings ago. She’d told me she was going to build a “castle for Dada” out of glitter and macaroni.

She had no idea what kind of sadistic monster I really was.

Niall stepped forward again. “They’re bluffing. No one touches your blood, Harry. We’ll find Alaska.”

“No.” My voice cracked, just once. Then it hardened. “They know me. They know the one thing I wouldn’t gamble.” My Alaska is the most precious thing in life.

My phone buzzed again. This time, a photo. My daughter, tied to a chair in a dark room. A stuffed bunny clutched in her lap. A single tear down her cheek.

You, my beautiful wife, came up behind me. You saw the photo on my phone. You let out an anguished sob.

I closed my eyes. The air in the room went still. And in that silence, the king of the city—killer, ruler, legend—broke.

“I built this world for her,” I whispered. “What good is it if she dies in it?”

For the first time in my life I was terrified.