“It’ll be okay, buddy,” she choked out. She wiped her eyes and held on tight to the pillow as she looked around the room. It was then she noticed that her sister’s usually spotless place was a complete mess.

“Looks like those assholes were already here.” She shook her head, feeling violated at the thought of those killers pawing through her sister’s things.

Gemma pulled out her cell phone and dug around the back pocket of her jeans for Detective Greene’s number.

“This is Greene,” his gruff voice rang out over the phone.

“Detective, this is Gemma Perry. I'm at my sister’s apartment and it’s been ransacked. It’s a mess. My sister would've been so upset,” she trailed off.

“I thought that might be the case. I've already sent an officer over to secure the premises. Try not to touch anything. Use a tissue or a glove. We want to be able to get fingerprints,” Detective Greene instructed. “Can you tell me what was taken?”

“Um, her computer is gone.” Gemma walked around growing more and more confused. “But that’s all.”

“That’s all? TV and jewelry still there?” he asked, perplexed.

Gemma walked into the bedroom and opened the jewelry case sitting on the dresser. “That's all I can tell is missing. Jewelry and other valuables are still here.”

“Your sister was an investigative reporter; did she ever investigate dangerous people?”

“All the time . . . do you think this was planned?” Gemma asked as her heart stilled. She instinctively went to the door and looked into the empty hall as if the killers might be there waiting to be caught. She shut and locked the door and set the security chain before going back into her sister’s bedroom.

“I’m beginning to think that. The crime scene screams professionals. Who would want your sister dead?”

“I don’t know. She was working on something, but she didn’t tell me what. Hold on. She has a drawer filled with flash drives for storing her research and notes.” Gemma hurried from the bedroom, down the narrow hall, and back into the living room. Gia’s desk was on the far side near the kitchen, overlooking the fire escape.

Using a tissue, Gemma opened the top right drawer and looked in. “Empty. All her flash drives are gone.”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Detective Greene said as Gemma heard the sound of a car being started.

“Okay. I’ll sit tight.”

The boss watched his right-hand man, Sergei Klimov, look up from the reporter’s computer and curse in what had to be Russian. “That suka had nothing on her computer,” Sergei yelled as he threw the laptop into the wall. The screen cracked and broke when it fell onto the floor.

“Tell me you've found something on those flash drives,” he growled. He felt his anger radiating from his thin frame. This was why he hired help like Sergei and all the other little minions. They were supposed to take care of these things for him. That’s why he was the boss.

He knew a man like Sergei held power simply because of his physical strength—and the fact he was a psychopath. While he himself stood only five-feet-eight inches or so and probably weighed half of what Sergei did, there was no way Sergei would ever cross him. While he may not look physically intimidating, he was quite possibly the most powerful man on the planet.

He could overthrow a dictator, a president, or even an entire royal family with a flick of his manicured hand. With one press of the button on his phone, a country could be bombed or a satellite shot down. Of course, people had to pay heavily for him to issue those orders.

At any given time, he was orchestrating arms deals with rebels, pirates, and warlords while running a highly profitable sex-trafficking ring. His men ran the black market for guns, weapons, and stolen goods. He had just sold The Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael on the black market for $100,000,000 to a private art collector in France. The portrait, rumored to be a self-portrait of Raphael dating back to the sixteenth century, had been stolen from Poland by the Nazis during World War II. While the Polish ministry had been on a wild goose chase for decades all through Europe trying to locate it, he had broken into an old bank vault in Austria and had stolen it for himself.

He had more money than many nations and more people of power in his pocket than all of the lobbyists in D.C. He had done it all by himself, too. The idea started when he was just a child, sitting in his room thinking, while his mother worked.

His mother had been a prostitute. He realized it by the time he was five. Men had come in and out of their small row house in New Jersey day after day. She was beautiful and they gave her things. They even gave him things. Later his mother had told him her body was marketable and she was going to use that to her advantage. She had her eyes set on the governor of New Jersey and a better life for her family.

She wasn’t shy about the fact that his father was her high school sweetheart who had died in Vietnam along with so many other men. She later told him that her heart had died that day and the only way to put food on the table was to use her body. She started off small, with city council members and influential merchants. They received free groceries and a bus pass that month.

By the end of the year, she was the mistress to the governor and her son was starting first grade in the best private school in the state. But, she hadn’t stopped there. She moved on to senators and eventually the vice president of the United States. All the while, the boy had listened and learned. These men had real power and he learned by listening to them talk on the phone when they visited his mother. Sometimes they held meetings at his mother’s new condo, and he’d be able to stealthily observe, study, and discover the secrets of the game. For his eighth birthday, his mother gave him a camera and he had realized a new way to get the power he had been dreaming of.

But soon it was over. By the time he finished his freshman year of high school, his mother had grown older and had been tossed aside. At the end of that year, the principal had approached him in the private school’s library and told him he wouldn't be able to continue in the fall. His scholarship was no longer being funded.

His classmates had laughed as he ran out of the school that day. They all knew who he was and why he was there. But now that he no longer had the governor’s protection, he was fair game. They had cursed him and called his mother names as he packed up his locker.

His mother had saved money for his college, which he thought he could use to finish high school. But before the next school year started, she became depressed. She felt weak and helpless. Her youth and beauty had been her identity and now it was gone. She slowly turned to drugs and by August, the money was gone and his mother was lost to heroin.

He had begged the school for a scholarship, but they said no. They had admitted him as a favor in the first place, and now no money would be coming his way. It was then he decided to take the power away from those who had hurt his mother. He had hurried home and had opened the small suitcase he’d hidden under his bed. Opening it up, he’d stared at the pictures he had taken over the years. The first had been his most powerful—his mother and the vice president having sex.

They hadn’t even known he was there. He was supposed to have been at chess practice but had skipped it. He knew it had been wrong to take the pictures, but he had been compelled. He had sneaked past Secret Service agents sitting in the lobby of the condo building while he pretended to be a Russian spy. He was on a mission to get the evidence to prove the Russians were building nuclear weapons. As part of his game, he quietly turned the large round knob and pushed open the front door to his condo. All he could see was his mother’s hair hanging down her back as she moaned from the top of the dining room table. The vice president’s face was looking right at the camera, except his eyes had been closed in ecstasy.

Looking at it now he felt the power in it. The vice president was running for the presidency, and this photo would destroy him. With a smile, he put the picture in his backpack and hopped on the bus for the nation's capital.

That had been the beginning of his career. It had only grown since then. Every time he brought one more person of power down to their knees, he thought about those boys who had bullied him when he had been told to leave school.

When he was sixteen, his mother had died from a drug overdose. While he had tried to save her, she was too far lost in the haze of drugs. Instead of going to live with some aunt he had never met, he used his skills to follow street dealers until he identified mid-level management in the local drug trade. He used them to track down the head of the area’s cartel. He gathered evidence and turned it all over to the police. When the ring began to collapse, he stepped in and quickly took over.

The street thugs vying for the head job were just too stupid to run it so he made a deal with the toughest thug. The thug would use the physical force necessary for the takeover, just like Sergei was doing for him now. When college started two years later, he handed over power to the thug for a steady twenty percent of all profit.

In college, he fell in love with art and discovered the very profitable side of the black market. After graduating, he’d mastered theft, forgery, weapons, and more. He used his connections to gather evidence and then blackmailed his way to the top. He’d been untouched, unthwarted, and unscathed for all this time—until his dog-fighting ring in Keeneston, Kentucky, was busted last year.