“Dad?” the boy whispered.
The word was paper-thin. It was the dry whistle of wind through a broken glass pane:
*k-k-k.*
The word shattered eighteen years of calculated mafia insulation. It pulverized my empire, my soldiers, my millions in offshore bearer bonds, and my carefully constructed identity into twenty million jagged shards of worthless scrap iron.
I didn’t speak.
I dropped to one knee on the cold linoleum floor.
I wrapped my arm around the five-year-old boy, pulling him against my tailored lapel with such fierce, crushing density that his small sneakers lifted two inches off the tile. I buried my face into the rough wool of his oversized thrift-store sweater, smelling the damp rain, the city grime, and the unmistakable, clean, sweet scent of my own blood:
“I’m here, Leo,” Ethan Vance wept into the boy’s neck.
The tears that had not fallen when my warehouse exploded, the tears that had been frozen behind ten years of brutal gangland executions, broke through my eyelids in a scalding, uncontrollable torrent:
“I have you. Nobody… nobody is ever going to hurt you again.”
*CLACK.*
The heavy double doors of Trauma Bay Three did not swing open; they were pushed aside by two men wearing full service dress blue uniforms bearing the four silver stars of the **Joint Chiefs of Staff**.
