The rain had turned into a howling northeast gale by the time our three-car convoy arrived at the industrial waterfront of Charlestown.

The secondary vault was hidden beneath a defunct brick sugar refinery overlooking the black, churning waters of the Mystic River. Thick black smoke was already billowing from the shattered basement windows, mixing with the heavy rain and carrying the acrid stench of burning paper and chemical accelerants.

“Stay in the car!” Thomas Vale shouted to me as he kicked open his door, pulling his submachine gun from the passenger seat.

“No!” I yelled back, grabbing my laptop bag and throwing open my door into the freezing wind. “The physical backup files are organized under a double-entry Dewey decimal system! Dominic’s men won’t know which boxes contain the federal evidence and which contain worthless receipts! I have to go in!”

Dominic reached out, grabbing my wrist with a iron grip as he stepped out into the rain. “Norah, it’s a trap! Moretti knows we have to protect those files!”

“If those files burn, you go to federal prison for life, Dominic!” I screamed over the roar of the wind and the crackle of distant gunfire inside the refinery. “Let me do my job!”

Dominic stared at me through the pouring rain, his dark hair soaked, his eyes burning with fierce conflict. Finally, he released my wrist, pulling a compact silver 9mm pistol from his coat pocket and pressing it into my hands.

“Three rounds in the clip,” Dominic commanded fiercely. “If anyone who isn’t wearing a Mercer lapel pin comes down that corridor, you empty it into their chest. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said, my fingers closing around the cold steel of the handgun.

We sprinted into the burning refinery.

Inside, the lower level was a hellscape of orange flames, blinding smoke, and echoing gunfire. Dominic’s strike team moved through the burning corridors, engaging Moretti’s mercenaries in a brutal, point-blank firefight.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Muzzle flashes illuminated the dense smoke as I ducked beneath a flaming steel beam, sprinting down the concrete staircase toward the underground archive room.

The heavy steel vault door had been blown open with thermal explosives. Inside, tall rows of industrial shelving were engulfed in flames.

A lone figure in a dark rain jacket was throwing military-grade thermite canisters onto the bottom shelves—where the oldest, most critical ledger books were stored.

“Hey!” I screamed, pulling up Dominic’s 9mm with both hands.

The figure spun around. It was Don Moretti’s younger brother, Leo—a sadistic enforcer known for his brutality on the docks.

Leo smiled through the smoke, pulling a heavy revolver from his belt. “Well, well. Look who came to save the boss’s books. The little accountant.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t think about my master’s degree or my forensic accounting career.

I pulled the trigger.

BANG!

The heavy recoil slammed through my wrists. The round caught Leo directly in the shoulder, spinning him backward into a burning rack of metal shelves. He screamed, dropping his revolver as a shelf loaded with three hundred pounds of steel binders collapsed on top of him.

I dropped to my knees, ignoring the blistering heat radiating off the floor, and began grabbing the heavy leather-bound ledgers from the unburned top shelves, shoving them frantically into my fireproof canvas bag.

“Norah!”

Dominic’s voice thundered through the burning doorway.

He burst into the vault, his dark suit scorched, a bloody cut running across his temple. He saw Leo trapped under the burning shelf, saw the gun in my hand, and saw the heavy bag slung over my shoulder.

“The 1998 to 2010 manifests!” I gasped, coughing violently as dense black smoke filled my lungs. “I got them, Dominic! I got the originals!”

Dominic didn’t look at the ledgers. He grabbed me by the waist, lifting me completely off my feet, and threw me over his shoulder as a section of the concrete ceiling collapsed in a shower of sparks and flaming debris where I had been standing a second before.

“Hold on to me!” Dominic roared, carrying me through the inferno like a warlord carrying his prized treasure from a burning fortress.

He sprinted through the collapsing basement corridors, ducking beneath falling embers, his boots crushing shattered glass and spent shell casings, until we burst out of the side entrance into the freezing, beautiful rain of the alley.

We hit the wet pavement together, rolling across the asphalt as the sugar refinery behind us exploded in a massive fireball, blowing out every window for three blocks.

I lay on my back in the pouring rain, gasping for air, the cold water washing the soot and ash from my face.