The punch came so fast I never even saw Derek Lawson move. One second I was standing beside booth six holding a glass coffee pot, and the next my vision exploded white, my body hit the diner floor, and somewhere above me I heard the man who had just knocked me unconscious laughing.

The following night, rain swept across the East River in heavy, freezing sheets.

Pier 42 was an abandoned coffee processing facility owned by one of Vincent’s shell corporations. The rusted iron beams overhead creaked under the Atlantic wind, and the smell of salt and wet rust was suffocating.

I sat in a wooden chair near the center of the vast, empty concrete floor, illuminated by a single overhead bulb dangling from an exposed wire. My hands were tied loosely behind my back with soft rope that Vincent had personally ensured would not bruise my skin.

Behind the darkness of the surrounding shipping crates, eighteen of Vincent’s men were positioned with suppressed automatic weapons.

Vincent stood forty feet back in the dark, his charcoal overcoat buttoned against the draft, watching the iron entrance doors.

At precisely 11:45 PM, a pair of heavy headlights cut through the rain outside.

The side door of the warehouse creaked open, and four men stepped into the light.

In the center walked Raymond Fletcher.

He looked older than I remembered. His hair was thinning at the temples, his leather coat worn at the elbows, but his posture still carried that familiar, toxic authority that had haunted my nightmares for two years. His eyes swept the dark space until they landed on me.

A slow, sick smile spread across his face.

“Hello, Clara,” Raymond said, his voice echoing against the corrugated iron walls. “You look terrible.”

I didn't answer. I kept my chin up, staring at him without flinching.

“Do you have any idea how much money you’ve cost me?” Raymond continued, stepping closer, his hands tucked deep into his pockets. “Two years I spent tracking you down. And you were slinging coffee in Brooklyn like a peasant.”

Behind Raymond, three heavily built men from Albany scanned the shadows with drawn handguns.

“Where’s Lawson?” Raymond demanded, looking around the empty floor. “He said he’d be standing here with the drive.”

“Derek couldn't make it,” a voice called out from the dark.

Vincent stepped into the circle of light.

Raymond’s hand instantly went toward his shoulder holster, but before his fingers touched leather, the dark rafters above filled with the metallic clatter of twenty gun slides being pulled back simultaneously.

Red laser sights bloomed across Raymond’s chest and the foreheads of his three bodyguards.

Raymond went dead still, his breath freezing in his throat.