The Hollow Hours
Eleven minutes past midnight, rain sheeting sideways off the Chicago River, Cael Merrick's sister walks into his eleventh-floor office and changes everything. Soraya Khan has spent years keeping her distance from her brother's work, but tonight she arrives with something desperate pressing against her ribs and a name she refuses to speak. A seasoned private investigator with a twice-broken nose and a talent for unfinished cases, Cael understands the weight of a silence like hers, and he knows what it costs to break it. As the hollow hours stretch toward dawn, his investigation reaches into the lives of family, old allies, and people who should know better than to come looking for him: a missing person tangled up in a decade-old grudge, a borrowed car dumped near the river, a body in a place where no one should have been. Every thread Cael pulls tightens around someone he recognizes, and the closer he gets to the truth, the clearer it becomes that Soraya came to him not for help, but because she had nowhere left to run. With sunrise bringing the city's reckoning, Cael must decide how far he is willing to follow the case, and how much of his sister he is prepared to lose in the dark.