At 11:40 on Christmas Eve, the woman who had quietly cared for my home for three years called me from a hospital bed with a broken wrist and a bruised face. She thought she was calling to apologize for missing Christmas breakfast, but her voice made the coldest man in Boston walk through those emergency room doors alone.

By five o'clock in the morning, the snow had stopped, leaving Boston wrapped in a dead, crystalline silence.

The South Boston Fish Pier extended out into the dark, freezing waters of the harbor like a black wooden finger. The tide was low, the ice crashing softly against the pilings below. A single yellow streetlight flickered at the end of the pier, casting long, distorted shadows across the wet wooden planks.

I stood at the edge of the dock, my hands buried deep in the pockets of my black coat.

Behind me, parked in the shadows of an empty fish processing warehouse, sat three dark Suburbans. Twelve of my best men—armed with silent, high-caliber weapons—stood hidden behind the stacked wooden crates, their eyes scanning the perimeter.

A set of headlights appeared at the entrance of the pier.

A battered gray pickup truck rumbled slowly over the icy planks, its rusty exhaust pipe spewing thick clouds of white vapor into the freezing air. It pulled to a stop twenty feet away from me.

The driver's side door opened, and Jimmy O'Driscoll stepped out.

He was a thick-set man in his late forties, wearing a stained leather bomber jacket and heavy work boots. His face was red from the cold and heavy drinking, but his eyes were wide with a nervous, panicked energy.

Beside him stepped a taller, younger man with a silver anchor tattooed prominently across his throat—the man who had laid hands on Maeve.

Jimmy held a small, black leather notebook in his thick, gloved hand.

"Callum," Jimmy called out, his voice raw against the winter wind. "We brought the book. Just like you asked."

I didn't move. I didn't take my hands out of my pockets. "Step forward, Jimmy. Alone."

Jimmy hesitated, looking back at his muscle, but the young man with the throat tattoo was staring nervously at the dark windows of the warehouses surrounding them. He knew—just as Jimmy knew—that there were half a dozen red laser dots floating over their chests in the dark.

Jimmy walked forward, his boots crunching on the frozen salt lining the dock planks, until he was standing five feet away from me.

He held out the black notebook.

"Look, Callum," Jimmy began, his voice raspy as he tried to adopt a casual, businesslike tone. "This was a misunderstanding. The boys were looking for a high-value score near the transit station. They didn't know the girl belonged to you—"

"Did you open it?" I asked quietly.

Jimmy swallowed hard, his throat clicking. "We... we looked at a couple of pages. Just to see if it was worth anything. It's just household crap, Callum! Recipes! Grocery lists! Cleaning schedules! It's useless!"

"It was not useless to her," I said.

I took one step forward, taking the small black book from his hand. The leather was damp from the melting snow, but the pages inside were intact.

I slipped the notebook into my coat pocket.

"Who told you to target her, Jimmy?" I asked, my voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "You don't have the brains to track my staff schedules. Who paid you?"

Jimmy’s face went pale. He took a half-step back, his eyes darting toward his truck. "Nobody paid us, Callum! It was just a random hit—"

I didn't waste time arguing. I raised my left hand slightly.

From the shadows behind the fish crates, Liam Vance stepped forward with terrifying speed. Before the young man with the throat tattoo could draw his weapon, Liam had pinned him against the side of the truck, a heavy steel suppressor pressed flat against the man's throat tattoo.

The young man let out a high-pitched, pathetic whimper.

"I'm going to ask you one more time, Jimmy," I said, stepping closer until I could smell the stale whiskey on his breath. "And if you lie to me again, your nephew against that truck won't see Christmas morning."

Jimmy stared at the suppressor pressed into his nephew's throat. The swagger and toughness of the Charlestown extortionist dissolved instantly, revealing the pathetic coward underneath.

"It was Moretti!" Jimmy blurted out, his hands flying up in surrender. "Frank Moretti from the North End! He wanted to know your daily routine! He paid us five grand to get anything from inside your house! He said if we got him a security code or a schedule, he'd give us ten percent of his next shipment!"

Frank Moretti. The aging boss of the North End syndicate, a man who had been trying to contest my harbor shipping routes for five years.

I nodded slowly, feeling the icy resolution settle deep into my bone marrow.

"Take their weapons, Liam," I ordered calmly. "Burn their truck. Leave them to walk back to Charlestown in the snow."

"And Moretti, boss?" Liam asked from across the pier.