Chapter 1 - The Weight of Three Years
The clock on the second-floor landing struck three in the morning, and Dominic Moretti was still awake.
Again.
His bare feet moved soundlessly across the marble as he made his rounds—kitchen, library, parlor, study—the same circuit he had walked every night for one thousand and ninety-six nights. The house was a mausoleum of shadows. Moonlight bled through the tall windows in long white sheets, catching the dust on furniture no one sat on anymore. The air smelled of old wood and wilted flowers and something else. Something that had been dead for three years but refused to decay.
He stopped at the doorway of the east wing. His hand rose. His fingers brushed the doorframe of the room that had been painted soft blue. He did not open the door. He never opened the door. But he stood there long enough for the cold to seep through his robe and settle into his bones, and then he turned away.
Keep moving. If you stop, you drown.
Dominic was thirty-eight, though if he looked in a mirror—which he avoided whenever possible—he knew he would see a man who looked fifty. The Moretti family name had ruled the Eastern seaboard for three generations, a brutal, tight-knit criminal syndicate that ran shipping docks, union pension funds, and half the municipal judges in three states. When Dominic took over from his father at twenty-eight, he had been ruthless, sharp, and untouchable. But three years ago, the war with the rival Marcone family had cost him the only thing that had ever made the blood on his hands feel worth washing off: his wife, Clara, and their unborn child.
The war had ended the night Clara died. Dominic had personally wiped out three generations of the Marcone family in a single, silent, blood-soaked weekend. The city belonged to him now. Nobody challenged the Moretti syndicate anymore. Nobody dared to even whisper his name in public. But victory was a hollow, echoing mansion built on top of a grave.
He was halfway across the parlor when he heard it.
A sound so small it should not have registered. A whisper of fabric against carpet. The soft pad of something very light crossing the floor.
Dominic's body reacted before his mind caught up—three years of instinct coiled into a single pivot, his hand already reaching for the gun that was no longer in his waistband because he was in his own house, in his own robe, at three in the goddamn morning.
The hallway was empty.
He stood still, breathing through his nose, listening. The old house ticked and groaned around him. The grandfather clock swallowed seconds. Nothing.
Then he looked down.
A stuffed rabbit lay on the floor at the edge of the Persian rug. One ear was missing. The remaining ear was frayed and had been sewn back on at least twice with uneven thread. The fabric was faded from years of squeezing.
Dominic stared at it for a long moment. His heart was beating too hard. He could not remember the last time something had surprised him.
He bent down—slowly, because his knees had begun to ache on cold nights, another thing that had not been true before—and picked up the rabbit. The fabric was worn smooth against his thumb. It smelled faintly of lavender soap and warm milk.
He looked up.
The doorway to the east wing—the one he had just walked away from—was now open.
Not wide. Just a crack. A sliver of darkness where the door had been closed a moment ago. A sliver wide enough for a very small person to slip through.
The air left his lungs.
He crossed the parlor in five long strides, his bare feet silent on the cold wood, his hand pushing the door open. The hinges groaned. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, the furniture draped in white sheets like ghosts.
But there, in the center of the floor, sitting cross-legged on the dusty carpet in a pair of lion cub pajamas, was a child.
She looked up at him with large brown eyes, completely unafraid. Her dark curls were tangled from sleep. One hand was pressed flat against the carpet as though she had been feeling the texture of it. The other hand was empty.
“You found my rabbit,” she said.
It was not a question. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the calm certainty of someone who had never once doubted that things would work out exactly as they should.
Dominic's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
The rabbit was still in his hand.
“Your rabbit,” he repeated, his voice raspy from disuse.
“He's missing an ear,” she said, as though this explained everything. “Mama says that's what makes him special. He's the only rabbit in the whole world with exactly one ear, so you can never mix him up with anybody else.”
Dominic stood frozen in the doorway of the room he had avoided for three years. The room was supposed to be a crib. It was supposed to hold a white changing table, a mobile of stars, and a rocking chair he had spent two weekends assembling before the shooting at the restaurant. Instead, it was an empty box of dust and white sheeted furniture.
“Who are you?” Dominic asked softly.
The girl stood up, patting her knees. She was small, no older than three or four. “I'm Mia. Mama cleans your house. She said I have to be very quiet like a mouse because the big boss is sleeping. But you aren't sleeping.”
She took two steps forward, stopping right in front of the formidable mafia boss who had killed nineteen men with his own hands. She didn't look at his height, or the scars on his knuckles, or the dark circles carved deep into his face.
She looked straight up into his eyes.
“You walk all night because you're sad,” she said simply.
Dominic felt a sudden, sharp pressure in his chest, as if a rusted lock had been forced open with a crowbar. He couldn't speak. He couldn't breathe.
Mia reached out. She didn't take her rabbit. Instead, her small, warm fingers wrapped around two of Dominic's large, callous-rough fingers. She pulled gently.
May you like
“You don't have to walk anymore,” she whispered. “Sit down. I'll share my rabbit with you.”
Dominic Moretti, the terror of the city, sank down onto the dusty floor of his dead child’s nursery, sat cross-legged opposite a three-year-old in lion pajamas, and for the first time in three years, he stopped moving.
