TEAR THE CITY DOWN

Coltrane is getting out. After years spent cleaning up other people’s secrets, scandals, and sins, he has been methodically closing the accounts of his old life. He has fallen in love, and for the first time, the future offers something other than leverage and damage control. A different life is finally within reach.

Then Anthony Riddell, an NFL All-Pro running back with a career-defining contract extension on the line, becomes the target of a blackmailer after a night that was supposed to stay off the record.

Someone has dirt on Riddell. Something that could end his career, wipe out tens of millions in guarantees, and turn a franchise’s future into collateral damage. A blackmailer is threatening to take it public, and the most powerful agent in the league, trained by a man who moves money and people like chess pieces, needs the problem erased. Quietly. Completely.

There is only one person he trusts for work like that.

What should have been Coltrane’s final step into a quieter life pulls him back into the deepest layers of power. His search leads him into a sealed world of executives, politicians, financiers, and fixers who trade in secrets the way others trade in stocks. Their most exclusive gathering, an invitation-only summit hidden behind walls of money and influence, is where reputations are built, careers are destroyed, and silence is enforced.

It is not a party.

It is a marketplace.

As Coltrane digs deeper, he realizes Riddell is not just in danger. He is leverage, a piece in a much larger system that runs on control, loyalty, and fear. And the people who run that system do not clean up problems.

They remove them.

With a contract deadline closing in and a blackmailer tightening the noose, Coltrane must decide how much of the life he is trying to leave behind he is willing to reclaim, and what it will cost the woman he loves if he does. Because the world he is being pulled back into does not allow clean exits, and it does not forgive unfinished business.

At this level, power does not just corrupt.

It owns.

And Coltrane is running out of time.