I had believed them.
I had spent six years turning myself into an unfeeling monster of pure iron and concrete—crushing every syndicate that had touched that bombing, drowning the waterfront in vengeance, and convincing myself that love was an architectural defect in a man who governed the streets.
Now, her eyelids fluttered beneath the halogen glare.
Her hazel eyes—clear, intelligent, framed by dark lashes, but hollowed by years of malnutrition and terror—focused on my face.
She lifted a trembling hand toward the oxygen mask.
I stepped to the edge of the bed, reached down, and gently pulled the green plastic mask down to her chin.
“Claire,” I whispered.
My voice had no microphone, yet it was forty decibels of compressed, unyielding polar diamond.
“Ethan…” she breathed, her lips cracked, her voice raw, catching on the edge of her teeth: “You… you brought him back.”
“Leo brought me,” I replied, my fingers gently touching the faint, crescent-shaped scar beside her left eyebrow—the scar she had earned when she pulled me out of a collapsing drainage ditch in Red Hook in twenty-sixteen:
“He pounded on my car window on Fifth Avenue. He was carrying my truck.”
A tear slipped from the corner of Claire’s eye, cutting a clean path through the alley grime on her temple:
