*Prologue*
Washington Park, Chicago – 2025
Cheyanne Carter's life had never been easy. "Complicated" didn't begin to cover it. Her world was a twisted mess of broken promises, desperation, and violence—woven together by the reckless hands of the man who was supposed to protect them.
Her father was a drunk. Not the harmless, fall-asleep-on-the-couch kind, but the kind who dragged ruin behind him like a storm. He had a gift—if it could be called that—for getting their family tangled in things they had no business being part of. Debt. Gangs. Blood feuds. It all traced back to him, to the bottles he clung to like lifelines and the bets he never stopped making.
They lived in the crime-ridden corpse of a city once known as Chicago. But the soul of the city had long since rotted. Washington Park—second only to Englewood in murders and disappearances—was the place they called home. It wasn't somewhere to live. It was a place to survive. Every time Cheyanne stepped outside, she scanned her surroundings like a soldier. Every dark alley or broken streetlight could be hiding someone with a knife—or worse. Especially now.
Ten years earlier, the Prohibitionists had risen again. With them came the end of legal alcohol. Like ghosts from the 1920s, they blamed the nation's sins—violence, corruption, poverty—on liquor. As if a bottle of whiskey was the root of evil, not the desperate, power-hungry men who drank it. The government hadn't learned from the past. They didn't see the movement as a way to protect the people—but as a means to control them.
By 2022, the entire country was dry. Alcohol was outlawed, demonized, hunted. But people didn't stop drinking—they just took greater risks. Booze became like heroin. Underground distilleries popped up. Black market shipments rolled in. Speakeasies thrived behind the facades of laundromats and bakeries. Every bottle carried the risk of prison or death, depending on who you crossed. And in Chicago, it wasn't just the law you had to fear. It was the men who operated above it.
The mafia had waited patiently for Prohibition to return, and when it did, they struck fast and merciless. They didn't just take over the city—they claimed it. The street gangs that once ruled the inner neighborhoods like rival kings were either absorbed into mafia syndicates or wiped out. And wiped out meant exactly that—entire families vanished overnight. No funerals. No bodies. Just rumors. A message to the rest: Obey, or disappear.
The Sicilian mafia—the Carbones—ruled Chicago now. Them, and their rivals, the Brunos. Ruthless, blood-soaked opportunists who treated people like currency. Between the two families, they controlled most of Illinois and had sunk their claws deep into New York City. The UN made noise about cracking down, about restoring order, but it was all for show. Everyone knew the truth. The mafia held more power than the people elected to lead. Politicians were bought. Judges were bought. Entire police departments operated under mafia paychecks. Some families didn't even bother hiding it anymore—they ran for office themselves. Senators. Mayors. Governors. Corruption wasn't a secret in America. It was policy.
But it hadn't always been this way for the Carters. Cheyanne remembered the before—before everything fell apart. They'd once lived in Florida, in a modest beach house where the air smelled like salt and her mother smiled more than she cried. Back then, her father had been someone. A respected criminal defense attorney. He had clients, status, money. They had everything they needed.
Then came the job offer. A firm in Chicago promised double his salary. It seemed too good to be true—and it was.
They moved north. Left behind the ocean and the sun. That was eleven years ago—one year before the second wave of Prohibition drowned the country. The firm collapsed not long after they arrived. Its clientele had been speakeasies and brewers, and when the Supreme Court handed down the Prohibition ruling, the entire company went under. The Carters were left stranded, broke, and abandoned in a city they didn't understand.
With no money and no contacts, they settled in Washington Park. Cheyanne's mother took two jobs just to keep food on the table. Her father? He took to the bottle. Or maybe the bottle took him. He started frequenting every underground bar he could find, pouring their last dollars into cheap, illegally brewed poison. He gambled, drank, and got involved with the wrong people.
And when Cheyanne thought of wrong people, she thought of the Brunos.
Loan sharks in Armani suits. Her father owed them more than he could ever repay. He thought he could drink his way out of despair. Instead, he dug a grave—and he didn't go into it alone.
Her older sister, Natalie, was the first to pay the price.
She vanished on a rainy Tuesday, three days after their father missed a payment. No note. No witnesses. Just gone. The message was clear: the Brunos collect, one way or another. Rumors said she was alive, hidden away in one of their brothels, her body treated like currency until the debt was cleared. But the Carters prayed she was dead. Death was mercy compared to the alternative.
After Natalie, it was just Cheyanne and her little brother, Jacob. Twelve years old and already old enough to understand fear. The kind that gripped your chest every time a car you didn't recognize slowed in front of the house. The kind that twisted your stomach in knots, wondering if tonight was the night they came again.
The Brunos didn't like taking boys. They didn't see them as assets—they saw them as loose ends. And loose ends were tied up with bullets.
Cheyanne's mother fought tooth and nail to keep them afloat. To keep the wolves from the door. She worked herself raw, paying off small pieces of her husband's debt just to buy another week of safety. But deep down, they all knew how this would end. The payments were never enough. The debt was too high.
And Cheyanne was next.
Her world—the fragile, splintering thing she clung to—was on the verge of collapse. The worst part? None of it was her fault. She hadn't chosen this life. It was inherited. Passed down like a curse from a man who couldn't stop drinking long enough to notice that his family was burning around him.
People liked to say you made your own destiny. But they were wrong. Sometimes, you were born into a storm. And no matter how hard you fought, the flood still came.
Her father lit the match.
And now, they were all choking on the smoke.
