“My entire family was slaughtered three years ago by Alistair Kirkland, the usurper who stole the underworld throne. I was the only survivor. Smuggled out of New York as a child, I was trained in the shadows to become a flawless weapon. Now, at sixteen, I returned to the city that was supposed to be my graveyard. But the New York I returned to was a suffocating cage. Kirkland didn't just wipe out the Valenzuela bloodline; he branded my few surviving loyalists as traitors. He paraded my men down the streets in heavy iron chains, letting the very people we once protected hurl rocks at them. He bought the doctors, ensuring my wounded soldiers would bleed out in the dark. Even worse, the mother of my only ally-Julian Morgan-secretly sold us out to a Chicago warlord just to keep her archaic grip on power. I stood in the shadows, watching an eleven-year-old boy get his head smashed with a jagged stone just for defending his father's honor. How could the city my grandfather built cheer for our extermination? Why did the old guard prefer to cower and die in the dark rather than fight the monster who stole our home? "Ghosts don't knock on my door, Athena. What do you want?" Julian asked me. I tossed a blood-stained ledger of Kirkland's deepest secrets onto his desk. "I'm here to help you take back what's yours, and burn Alistair Kirkland's empire to the ground."”