The phone call came at 2:47 a.m., and it split my life into before and after.

I was elbow-deep in cold, greasy water behind the bar at Rosie's, scrubbing pint glasses that never seemed to end. My back ached. My feet were numb from a fourteen-hour shift. The neon lights flickered their usual sick pink and blue across the sticky vinyl floors, and I was counting the minutes until I could lock up, drive home, and check on Leo.

Leo. My seventeen-year-old brother. The only family I had left since Mom died of ovarian cancer when I was fourteen and he was six. The kid with the crooked smile and the congenital heart defect that was slowly, quietly killing him.

My phone buzzed against the wet counter. I almost ignored it—my hands were pruned, and the only person who called this late was Leo, usually because he couldn't sleep and wanted to hear my voice. But the number wasn't Leo's.

It was Mount Sinai Hospital.

"Miss Castillo? This is Dr. Reeves. I'm calling about your brother Leonardo. His condition has deteriorated significantly. The valve is failing faster than we projected. We need to move the surgery up immediately."

My hands stopped moving in the soapy water. "How long do we have?"

"Seventy-two hours. After that, the damage becomes irreversible."

"The surgery costs two hundred thousand dollars. I have eleven."

A pause. The kind doctors give when they've already done the math and the answer is a body bag. "I understand, Miss Castillo. But if the funds can be arranged, his prognosis is excellent. He's young. He's strong. He just needs the chance."

I hung up. Pressed my wet palms flat against the bar and breathed.

Two hundred thousand dollars. I made nineteen an hour plus tips that never added up. I'd been saving for eight months and had eleven thousand in a shoebox under my mattress. The gap was a hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars, and I had three days.

I'd tried everything. Banks laughed me out. GoFundMe raised twelve hundred in two months. I'd sold my mother's wedding ring, my laptop, everything that wasn't nailed down. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

There was only one option left. The kind of option that doesn't show up in daylight.

A co-worker, Manny, had once told me about a man who made "arrangements" with desperate people. A man who could move two hundred thousand dollars the way normal people moved pocket change. A man whose name was spoken in whispers, like a weather event—something you couldn't control and couldn't survive.

Julian Vance.

The name alone was a myth wrapped in fear. The Vance family had ruled the city's criminal underworld for three generations. Julian, the youngest Don in mafia history, had taken the throne at twenty-five after his father's suspicious heart attack and his uncle's convenient disappearance. He was a ghost. A tyrant. A man sculpted by the devil himself.

I had no business going near a monster like Julian Vance. But Leo was my entire world. And the world was giving me seventy-two hours to save him.

I locked up the bar. Grabbed my coat. Got in my beat-up Honda with the cracked windshield and the check-engine light that had been on since March. And I drove through the pouring rain, straight into the mouth of Hell.

The Vance estate was a fortress. Towering wrought-iron gates, grounds lit up like a military compound at four in the morning, security cameras on every pillar. I parked my rusty sedan between a Bentley and a matte-black G-Wagon and tried not to think about how much those two cars could pay for Leo's surgery three times over.

A guard built like a concrete wall stepped out of the shadows before I reached the front door. His jacket parted just enough to show the weapon strapped to his chest.

"I need to see Mr. Vance," I said. My voice was shaking, but my eyes weren't.

He looked me up and down—the stained apron, the messy bun, the mascara smeared across my face. "You got an appointment, sweetheart? Mr. Vance doesn't do charity."