Chapter 5
The penthouse in Tribeca occupied the entire top floor of a glass tower known to exactly three people in the world. Biometric locks. Bulletproof glass. A private medical bay stocked for gunshot wounds and nothing so small as a fever. It was, Damiano told Mara as the armored convoy pulled away from the estate in the dark, the safest place left on earth for his son.
For Mara, it became something else entirely. A strange, suspended pocket of time unlike anything she had known since before Cole, before the stairs, before the small pink casket she still couldn’t think about without her chest caving in. Damiano didn’t treat her like staff here. He ate dinner across from her every night. He asked about her childhood in upstate New York, about the apple orchard behind her grandmother’s house, about the year she spent working at the diner in Saratoga. He listened — actually listened — in a way that made something in her chest ache differently than grief did.
And every evening, when she settled into the armchair to feed Nico, Damiano would sit nearby and watch with an intensity that made her skin flush and her breath catch. The boundary between mafia don and grieving father and something far more dangerous blurred a little more each night.
“You don’t have to worry, mia cara,” he told her on the third night, after something sharp and unfamiliar crossed her face at the mention of Vittoria forcing a marriage to consolidate power. “Vittoria D’Angelo will never set foot near you or my son again.”
But he couldn’t simply kill her. Not without proof the Commission would accept. Not without risking a war that would burn every family in New York to the ground. So on the fourth night, Damiano Moretti did the one thing he did better than almost anyone alive.
He lied.
Mara watched, half in awe and half in horror, as he transformed in real time — voice cracking, posture collapsing, the terrifying protector dissolving into a broken, desperate widower on the phone with the woman who had tried to murder his child. He described a fictional emergency at a fictional hospital. He begged her to come to him at an old safe house by the Brooklyn docks. “I just need you, Vittoria. You’re the only family I have left.”
“I’ll be right there, my love. Don’t move.”
The line went dead. Damiano’s face turned to stone the instant it did. “She took the bait,” he said, checking the magazine of his pistol with hands that had gone perfectly steady. “Bruno and the others are already waiting with the recording equipment. When she gloats, we have her.”
He crossed the room before he left, cupped the back of Mara’s neck with a warm, calloused hand, and traced her jaw with a tenderness that didn’t match the violence coiled beneath his skin. “I will always come back to you,” he murmured. He kissed her forehead. Then Nico’s. Then he was gone, the elevator doors sealing shut behind him.
Lock the doors. Do not open them for anyone but me.
Mara locked them. She checked the monitors. She waited.
Twenty minutes passed in silence before her phone buzzed with a text from a number she didn’t recognize.
Did you really think I was stupid enough to go to Brooklyn? Little bird, I tracked your master’s burner phone. I know exactly where you are.
May you like
The lights went out a heartbeat later. Somewhere below, the private elevator’s blast doors began to grind open in the dark.
Vittoria had never planned to go to Brooklyn at all.
