Eyes of the Unholy
Chapter One Sneak Peek

LUCIAN

God forgive me for what I’m about to do to the girl praying inside that church.

Our Lady of Lourdes loomed over East 90th, casting her shadow over Ruppert Park on the opposite side of the street. Swings creaked in the wind, and Christmas lights twinkled in the bare trees. Most of the neighborhood had already gone to bed.

Clean white snow blanketed the Upper East Side, as if God were trying to convince Himself that the world was still salvageable. Our Lady glowed against the winter night, her stone facade washed in warm up-light, her stained-glass stories of saints and sinners illuminated by the lamps burning within. A sanctuary. Safe and warm, for the right kind of soul. A place that should’ve repelled men like me.

Peace wasn’t on the schedule tonight.

Abduction was.

I shut the SUV door behind me as the winter cold bit at my face. Snowflakes clung to my lashes, melting as fast as they landed. I was a dark shape, dressed head to toe in black, meant to disappear into the night. The city was quiet, finally asleep after the holiday frenzy. Only an occasional taxi crawled past, tires crunching through the frozen slush.

“Mind yourself, brother,” Lachlan muttered from behind the wheel, watching me through the cracked window. “You sure you don’t want me to go in with you instead of just sittin’ around, waiting to high-tail it the fuck out of here?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Won’t take but a couple of minutes. Should be quiet and clean.”

He snorted. “You don’t do quiet and clean. You do loud and catastrophic, then swear it was all part of the plan.”

I braced a hand on the door frame and leaned in. “Just keep the engine running. When I call, cruise up to the east-side gate. We’re not hanging out here all night debating my life choices.”

His mouth pulled into a half-smile. “Aye, Captain.”

“Idiot,” I muttered, but there was no real menace in it. When things went sideways, Lachlan was the one man I trusted to plow through God and country to get me out.

I turned my back on the SUV and started toward the church. My breath ghosted in front of me as I walked, hands bare despite the temperature. Gloves dulled my grip, and tonight I needed precision.

Mayor Andrew Hayes’s only child was inside that building, bathing in candlelight and incense, kneeling in front of a God who’d stopped listening to me a long time ago.

I planned to put my hands on her regardless of the disrespect.

Not to hurt her, at least not if I could help it. But kidnapping a nun from a church on Christmas night still counted as the worst sort of blasphemy, even for an Irish heathen like me, whose soul was already half-charred.

Mam would’ve crossed herself and thrown holy water at me.

The thought made my jaw flex as I walked.

We’d only talked about it for a few minutes last night in the back booth at Cipher Coffee—me pitching the idea, Nikolai Volkov listening with that calculating, dangerous calm of his that made men twice as mean as me nervous. He ran the dark side of the underworld for The Syndicate, and whether I liked it or not, I answered to him. Lacey had sat beside him, looking between us as though she was tallying every way men such as us burned the world down. She’d quickly become the kind of woman who’d survived hell, learning to read men the way accountants read ledgers—debts, sins, weaknesses, all tallied up in a glance. She was Nik’s bratva queen.

I’d barely finished telling them my idea before she gave Nik that look—the one that said my plan might actually be worth the trouble. It had been my proposal, my play: take the daughter and put a leash on Hayes. Squeeze him until he coughed up everything he knew about Delgado, MS-13, the money pipelines, even the names tucked higher up the flesh-trafficking chain. Push the mayor hard enough, and the cartel backers hiding in their cozy government offices would start to sweat.

Power in our world was four things: violence, money, information, and loyalty. Tonight’s job touched all four.

Grabbing Hayes’s daughter would give us the perfect cocktail of leverage.

Risky? Sure.

Worth it?

If it clipped Delgado’s wings and reminded half of Manhattan that The Syndicate was the only thing standing between this city and complete chaos, then absolutely, it was worth it.

Across the way, Hayes’s only visible security for his precious daughter was a bored-looking guard leaning against a black town car, his nose red from the cold. He stood scrolling his phone as if the only threat he expected tonight was a drunk Santa pissing in the park behind us.

Lazy fuck.

That man’s carelessness told me everything I needed to know about Andrew Hayes as a father.

Politically, the man was a viper. Finishing his second and final term as mayor, he was ready to slither into a special Senate election with national eyes on him. He’d used his wife’s death to get elected. Used his daughter to make himself look devout. Used any ploy he could to get votes. And under all that polished PR bullshit, Delgado had his hands in the mayor’s pockets—buying him off with cartel money and backing him with MS-13 muscle. Favors were traded with a White House full of men who liked to pretend their dicks weren’t dipped in blood and young women’s tears.

My boots crunched over salted ice as I reached the far edge of the church’s front and stepped into the narrow alcove where the black iron service gate hid between stone and brick—an old alleyway once leading to the rectory garden. The guard didn’t even glance my way. If he had, he’d have taken me for an Upper East Side suit ducking out of the cold.

Picking the lock, the gate yielded under my hand with a soft metallic rasp. It was old. Neglected. Effortless. I eased it open just enough to slip inside, then left it slightly ajar behind me.

The noise of the street dropped away as I entered the side passage. Stone walls framed the tight alley, the cold air carrying a trace of lingering incense. Each step pulled me deeper into the church’s shadow, and toward the God my mother still believed could save us, if we’d just stop disappointing Him.

Too late for that.

I came to a stop in the narrow passage, letting the shadows settle around me while the past uncoiled in my head. Maybe it was the church, or the fact that it was Christmas night, but for a breath, the boy I’d once been brushed up against the man I’d become.

Mam had tried to keep us clean, bless her. Two boys hidden on a sheep farm in the Irish countryside, far from docks and guns and the Byrnes name. She’d begged us not to leave when we were barely grown. Da had just stood there, jaw tight, knowing you can only hold a man back from what he is for so long. I was too young to read that look then; I learned soon enough it was the face of a man watching history repeat itself.

We’d come to New York ten years ago. I was twenty, Lach was eighteen. No degrees, no family name that meant anything here, no one willing to give us a hand up. Just two stubborn Irish boys who knew how to work and how to fight.

We took day jobs breaking our backs on construction sites. Night jobs bouncing in clubs where the air tasted like smoke and bad decisions. We saved every dollar and every tip. We got close to Gabriel and Julian, and together built Club Xyst from dust and sheer will until it became the beating heart of Manhattan’s underworld—a neutral ground where the old families and the politicians came to drink, negotiate, and pretend they trusted each other.

We thought we’d built Xyst on our own, not realizing Anastasia had been quietly shielding it—and us—under Luca Genovese’s shadow for years. Her presence alone had tied us to Luca long before we understood the cost.

Ana had walked into our club one night, this mousy little librarian type looking for bookkeeping work—only she wasn’t mousy, and she sure as hell wasn’t harmless. We didn’t know she was a mafia princess. Didn’t know she was the daughter of a Russian Pakhan or Luca Genovese’s niece by marriage. Didn’t know she was running from an arranged marriage that was about to turn bloody. And we definitely didn’t know that hiring her would drag all four of us straight into a war.

Ana had brought trouble with her. Luca had cleaned up after her disappearance and had kept the NYPD off our backs more than once—debts we didn’t even know we owed him. The first time he visited Xyst in person, I didn’t take kindly to the veiled threats. I pushed back. One of his men rearranged my nose as a reminder that I wasn’t as untouchable as I thought.

That was the beginning of our uneasy orbit around the Genovese world.

And when Nik Volkov—Ana’s phantom twin brother, a hacker, billionaire, powerbroker—stepped into the picture, it became clear we were dealing with something far bigger than one runaway mafia princess. Nik didn’t just open doors; he controlled the locks. We weren’t ready for him, but respect came fast. Working with Nik was like standing next to a loaded weapon—dangerous, but you felt safer having him pointed at your enemies.

Last week, right before Delgado used the mayor to distract Nik and take Lacey, a ghost from the past found us. We’d learned about our bloodline during the ritual where we swore loyalty oaths, but meeting Jack Byrnes for the first time had taken us by surprise.

Uncle, he called himself, as though we were back home and he’d just dropped by the farm. He didn’t need a DNA test; he had Da’s eyes, his voice, and that Byrnes look on his face when he watched us. He told us the truth about our heritage—how Mam and Da had tried to bury who we were. We weren’t just shepherds’ sons from a quiet Irish town. We were sons of a powerful Irish clan that had once ruled with violence and ironclad loyalty. Our parents had tried to run from that world. And, fuck us, we’d walked straight back into it without even knowing.

Then Luca Genovese had sealed our fate in that Long Island ritual room with Nik at his side, blood on our palms, SIGs in velvet boxes, and offshore accounts set up in our names. Made men. Captains. Property of a war that was bigger than we’d ever imagined—and apparently useful enough to be given responsibilities for parts of it.

Tonight was the first time the play was mine.

Not Luca’s.

Not Nik’s.

Mine.

If it went well, I would give The Syndicate a handle on Hayes and his MS-13 friends. If it went to hell, we’d be knee-deep in a war with the feds, the press, and every bleeding-heart voter on the eastern seaboard.

LUCIAN

I shoved off the wall, boots scraping softly on stone, and kept moving down the passage.

The frosted-glass side door glowed faintly. There was no movement beyond it.

The woman would most likely be near the front. Alone. On her knees, with hands folded, and a veil hiding her hair. The perfect picture of purity.

Scarlett Hayes.

Her public dossier painted her as a fragile thing—a traumatized teen shipped off to a rigid Catholic boarding school in Spain after her mother’s death. Then she was tucked into a cloistered Carmelite monastery, where they drilled obedience into the young women and swore them to silence, poverty, and chastity. She’d been hidden for years, brought out only for carefully staged appearances at St. Patrick’s and a few photo ops with dear old Dad.

I didn’t buy the story, but it made for one hell of an image.

Every appearance was choreographed—her face dipped, half-turned, hidden beneath veils. The press never saw more than a pale profile and layers of a drab brown habit. Hayes made sure of that. The less they saw of her, the more they believed him.

But beneath that polished story was something far uglier—especially in the way her father used her to polish his own righteousness.

All the while, the war with Delgado was bleeding into City Hall. Hayes was letting a cartel animal carve up his city—moving flesh through his clubs, laundering money through his charities—in exchange for a Senate seat and a pat on the head from men in D.C. who treated young women as if they were party favors.

Hayes wanted power. Delgado wanted flesh. The White House wanted plausible deniability.

And The Syndicate wanted control—wanted to stamp out the flesh trade because there were lines even the old families refused to cross.

As for me? I wanted to be the man Nik and Luca trusted when this kind of shit had to be handled.

I pressed my palm to the cold glass, feeling the faint vibration of a heater somewhere deep in the old walls. The unlocked door silently opened, and I slipped inside.

Quiet and clean replayed in my mind.

I would be in and out before the guard outside got cold enough or bored enough to check on her. No mess. No witnesses.

God willing.

If He was even listening.

The church wasn’t dark. Warm pendant lights washed the soaring Gothic arches in gold, the illumination catching on carved stone and making the space feel impossibly tall. Uplighting along the sanctuary walls lit the vast murals from below, turning the painted saints into giants standing guard. White marble steps and balusters rose from the floor, catching every shimmer of light. Red poinsettias decorated the sanctuary, their color echoing the clusters of flickering red prayer votives, whose flames trembled like heartbeats in glass.

And there—dwarfed by it all—kneeled a lone figure before a bank of candles.

For a second, I forgot to breathe.

She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Perfect. Angelic. Her face caught the light in a way that didn’t feel real. Fair skin turned soft and luminous in the glow, her delicate features framed in shadow, all serenity and quiet grace—full red lips, temptation begging to be tasted, the kind of original sin no man stood a chance against. Too beautiful for the world she’d been forced into. Too beautiful for a father like Hayes selling his soul to the likes of MS-13. No wonder he hid her.

Then the rest of her came into focus.

She was wrapped in the full Discalced Carmelite habit, layer upon layer meant to smother any hint of the woman beneath. A brown wool tunic fell to her ankles, heavy and plain. The long scapular draped over it in two simple panels. A white mantle rested across her shoulders for the holy day, the whole thing swallowed under a black veil that hid her hair and framed that impossible face. Simple winter boots peeked from beneath the hem—practical, nothing fancy.

All that fabric.

All that modesty.

As if the church was trying to bury her under its rules.

And still she shone.

Of course, the one piece of leverage I had showed up on her knees, looking every bit the temptation begging to be ruined.

Too bad she was a fucking nun.