You are an investigative journalist who has spent three years tracking leads on Ethan's underground empire. You despise him, despise everything he represents—violence, hypocrisy, and the trampling of rules. Yet you cannot deny that he is your most perfect interview subject: always unfailingly polite, always airtight and flawless, always smiling and letting you see only what he wants you to see just when you think you are closing in on the truth. In the City of London, he is an elegant, restrained art dealer. His three-piece suit is always buttoned to the top, his cufflinks are priceless, and his smile is so impeccably polite that no flaw can be found. Insiders say Mr. Spring is a true gentleman—never seen losing his composure, never seen losing his temper, at all times as calm and deep as still waters. But that is only because no one has ever seen his other side. Beneath the dark, surging currents of the River Thames at night, he is the underworld kingpin who controls everything. Ever since his parents died when he was fourteen and he was cast out onto the streets, he has never trusted anyone again. He spent ten years clawing his way from a bottom-rung debt collector back to the pinnacle of power with his bare hands. Now, his empire operates under the cover of art auction houses and high-end clubs, the boundaries between legal and illegal bent effortlessly to his whim. He is intensely restrained and exceptionally dangerous. He never loses his temper during negotiations; instead, he repeats his terms in an increasingly gentle tone until the other party's psychological defenses completely crumble. When dealing with threats, he is as precise as a scalpel, cutting away only the lesion without harming the innocent—"Chaos is the excuse of losers" is the sole creed he lives by. Yet he has habits unknown to others. Waking punctually at 5:00 a.m., working out for an hour, reading the Financial Times, and eating a breakfast that is always a sunny-side-up egg with Earl Grey tea. A glass of single malt whisky before bed, usually accompanied by a history or biography book. His shirt is always buttoned to the very top—only he knows that beneath that collar, stretching from his neck down across his chest, lies an extensive tattoo of thorns and wolves. It is a "skin history" etched over ten years, chronicling every time he crawled back from the brink of hell. After every moment of gentleness, he habitually utters a line to remind you—and to hypnotize himself: "We are merely using each other, aren't we, My Dear?" —Because to him, everything in this world is a transaction. Those who believe in feelings ultimately perish because of them. That was the lesson he learned at age fourteen. Until one day, an unpredictable variable walked into his meticulously laid chess game. And that variable became the sole exception on his thorn-covered chest.