PART 2
Lily painted a red heart beneath the crooked rainbow on my nose, then leaned back with the grave concentration of an artist deciding whether her masterpiece was complete.
“There,” she whispered. “Now you don’t look lonely anymore.”
No one in the room moved.
My guards had watched men plead for their lives without so much as tightening their jaws. They had stood beside me during raids, betrayals, funerals, and meetings where a single wrong word could cost someone everything.
Yet now they stared at a three-year-old holding a paintbrush as though she had just performed a miracle.
Elena rushed forward with a damp cloth in one hand, her face drained of color.
“Mr. Romano, I am so sorry. I’ll clean it immediately.”
I raised one hand.
“Leave it.”
Elena stopped.
Even I heard the unfamiliar softness in my voice.
Lily smiled proudly, then lifted her battered stuffed rabbit and placed him carefully in my lap.
“Buttons can stay with you too,” she said. “He doesn’t like lonely people.”
The rabbit was missing one eye. One ear hung by a thread. Its gray fur had been rubbed nearly white from years of being held.
I looked down at it, absurdly aware that my hands had carried guns, contracts, and men’s fates more often than they had ever held anything innocent.
“Is he brave?” I asked.
“The bravest,” Lily said. “But sometimes brave people still need hugs.”
Something inside my chest tightened.
Before I could answer, the mansion’s front doors opened.
My consigliere, Vincent Moretti, stepped inside with two men behind him. Rain glistened on the shoulders of his black coat, and urgency sharpened his expression.
He took one look at my painted face and stopped so abruptly that the man behind him nearly collided with his back.
For three silent seconds, Vincent stared at the yellow sun on my cheek, the blue butterfly across my forehead, and the rainbow arching over my nose.
“Adrian,” he finally said, “we have a situation.”
Normally, those words meant betrayal, police pressure, missing money, or war.
But Lily pointed at him and giggled.
“You need colors too.”
One of the guards coughed into his fist to hide a laugh.
Vincent shot him a look that could have frozen boiling water.
Then he looked back at me.
“Privately,” he said.
The darkness in his voice erased the amusement from the room.
“Elena,” I said, standing slowly, “take Lily to the kitchen.”
Lily’s smile disappeared.
“Did I do something bad?”
I glanced at the tiny red heart she had painted on my cheek.
Then I knelt until we were eye level.
“No, piccola,” I said. “You did something no one else was brave enough to do.”
Her fingers touched the painted heart.
“Make you happy?”
The question was so simple that it nearly undid me.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “You made me happy.”
Relief brightened her face.
Elena took Lily’s hand, but the little girl looked back twice as they walked away. Buttons remained in my arms until she suddenly remembered him and hurried back.
“No,” she said, pushing the rabbit against my chest. “He stays.”
Then she followed her mother toward the kitchen.
The moment the door closed behind them, Vincent placed a photograph on the table.
My amusement vanished.
The photograph had been taken outside a courthouse. Elena stood near the steps, thinner and younger, holding a newborn baby wrapped in a pale blanket.
Lily.
Beside her stood a man wearing a dark baseball cap.
His face was turned partly away from the camera, but I knew the angle of his jaw. I knew the scar above his left eyebrow. I knew the signet ring on his hand.
I had given him that ring on his eighteenth birthday.
My younger brother.
Matteo.
The air left my lungs.
“That picture was taken three years ago,” Vincent said.
