Chapter 2 - The Red Chair and the Silent Mother
By dawn, my men were in a quiet state of collective panic.
When Marco, my chief enforcer, opened the study doors at seven o'clock expecting to brief me on a missing heroin shipment from the docks, he froze mid-sentence. He dropped his clipboard, his jaw unhinging as he stared at the sight of Alessandro Romano—the butcher of Brooklyn—asleep in a wingback chair with a three-year-old girl curled up on his chest, snoring softly.
“Boss...” Marco whispered, his hand hovering near his holster out of pure instinct. “Do you want me to...?”
“If you wake her up, Marco, I’ll feed you your own fingers,” I growled quietly, carefully sliding out from beneath Lily without waking her.
Her mother, Clara, arrived ten minutes later, breathless, pale, and shaking with a terror that made her drop a silver tray of breakfast dishes in the hallway. Clara worked in my house as a part of the domestic staff—quiet, hardworking, widowed two years prior by a stray bullet in a neighborhood gang crossfire that had nothing to do with us. She kept her head down, cleaned the sweeping marble floors, and never asked for favors.
When she saw Lily sitting in my study eating a brioche pastry off my personal china plate, Clara dropped to her knees, weeping tears of pure humiliation.
“Mr. Romano, please! I am so, so sorry! She wanders off when she’s sleepwalking, I swear to God she didn't mean to—don't hurt her, please, take me instead—”
“Shut up, Clara,” I commanded, my voice flat. I poured a cup of black coffee, watching the little girl happily dangle her bare feet off the edge of a mahogany chair I had already ordered Marco to drag into the study.
“Mr. Romano?” Clara whimpered, pressing her forehead against the floor.
“She stays here during my morning briefings,” I said, and the silence in the room became absolute. “Get her some coloring books. And a proper booster seat. The chair is too low for the desk.”
Clara stared at me, her tear-streaked face a mask of utter bewilderment. But she obeyed.
That was how the routine began. Within a week, Lily Bennett had effectively conquered the Romano estate.
She stole cookies off my plate while I negotiated arms deals on the encrypted satellite phone. She sat in her little red chair by my desk, coloring crude green horses and yellow suns while grown men—capos and killers who had slaughtered dozens—shivered in their boots just trying to stand where she sat. If she dropped a crayon, half a dozen hardened criminals lunged to pick it up.
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I never intended to care about her. I told myself she was a distraction, a brief anomaly in a life dedicated entirely to vengeance and duty. But every evening, when she looked up with those wide brown eyes and asked me if my chest was still crying, something ancient and frozen inside my chest began to thaw.
Then came the night of the theft.
