Chapter 1
"Yesterday," the little girl said. Her voice didn’t tremble. It was flat, measured, carrying the thin, brittle certainty of a child who had run out of choices hours before dawn. "Around dinner. But it was just warm water with a little sugar and the last spoon of powder. She kept crying, so I gave her the rest at five this morning."
The marble lobby of Moretti Holdings, usually alive with the clicking heels of high-priced corporate attorneys and the murmur of multi-million-dollar commodities trades, seemed to lose its air.
Dante didn’t look at Debbie. He didn’t look at the security guard who stood frozen ten paces back, wondering whether his employer was about to have the trespassers removed or fire the entire security shift. Dante looked only at the child.
He took three slow steps forward. He didn't tower over her. At six-foot-two, with shoulders that filled out bespoke Savile Row wool like an armor plate, he possessed a frame that made grown men press their backs against walls in passing. But now, he sank down onto one knee on the wet granite floor, the hem of his four-thousand-dollar charcoal overcoat pooling into the rainwater she had dripped from her shoes.
He brought himself level with her gray-green eyes.
"What is your name?" Dante asked. His voice had none of the ice he had used on Marco thirty seconds earlier. It was deep, low, and quiet—the tone of a man trying not to startle a sparrow trapped in a high-voltage cage.
"Mia," she said.
"And your sister?"
"Lily. She's six months. Almost seven."
Under the fraying edge of the waterlogged green blanket, a tiny fist punched against the air, pale and mottled with the damp morning chill. A faint, shuddering whimper escaped the bundle—not a healthy cry of anger, but the exhausted rasp of an infant who had discovered that screaming yielded no calories.
Dante reached out, his hand larger than the child's entire torso, and gently pulled the damp wool away from the baby's face. The infant was pale, her skin cool to the touch, dark hair clinging to her scalp with sweat and rain.
Dante’s thumb brushed the baby’s cheek. She immediately turned toward the warmth of his skin, rooting against his calloused knuckle with desperate, empty suckling motions.
Something inside Dante Moretti—a compartment he had welded shut twenty years earlier when his own younger brother had bled out in an alley off Taylor Street—cracked open with a silent, violent snap.