Chapter 2 - The Night Rain and the Story
The book was titled The King's Midnight Walk. It had bright, primary-colored illustrations of safari animals under a painted blue moon.
Lily turned the pages with slow, earnest precision. Her small voice filled the cavernous room—a space that usually echoed only with whispered phone calls about docks, offshore accounts, and police informants.
“Once upon a time,” Lily began, reading partly from memory and partly making it up as she went along, “there was a big lion who lived in a house with too many doors. The lion was worried about the foxes.”
I shifted slightly. “The foxes?”
“Yes. The sneaky ones. They wanted his breakfast.” She pointed to a poorly drawn cartoon fox hiding behind a bush in the book. “So the lion stayed awake for one hundred years.”
“Sounds exhausting,” I muttered.
“It made his eyes red,” she noted, looking up from the page to scan my face. “Like yours. Yours are very red, Mr. Moretti.”
I didn't answer. The quiet in the room was shifting. Usually, at 12:30 a.m., my mind was a racing machine, calculating shipping schedules, analyzing the Valenti crew’s movements across the Brooklyn waterfront, or wondering which of my underlings had leaked our dock manifests to federal agents.
But watching Lily trace the painted trees on the page, the noise in my head began to dull.
“What happened to the lion?” I asked.
“The little rabbit came,” she said, holding up her one-eared stuffed toy. “The rabbit said, ‘You are bad at sleeping.’ And the lion said, ‘I know.’”
A faint, unexpected breath of laughter escaped my chest. It was a sound I hadn't made in so long it felt unnatural in my throat.
“And then?”
“Then the rabbit sat on his feet so the cold air couldn't bite his toes.”
Without waiting for permission, Lily pulled her feet under her yellow pajamas and leaned her shoulder right against my knee. She was warm—unbelievably warm, like a small, soft furnace. She held the book higher so I could see the picture of the lion resting his large head on his paws.
“You have to close your eyes now,” she instructed softly.
“Lily, I don't close my eyes.”
“You have to. That’s how the story works.”
“I have work to finish.”
“The papers will stay on the desk,” she said, her voice dropping into a rhythmic, sleepy cadence. “They don't have legs. They can't run out into the rain.”
I looked down at her. Her eyelids were already getting heavy, fluttering down against her cheeks. Her small hand remained resting on my silk pajama sleeve, her thumb idly stroking the fabric.
I looked at the cold coffee. I looked at the shipping reports.
Then, for the first time in over one thousand nights, I leaned my head back against the leather headboard and closed my eyes.
The sound of the rain was still there, but it no longer sounded like footsteps on the terrace. It just sounded like rain.
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When Sophia pushed the door open twenty minutes later, terrified after waking up and finding her daughter’s bed empty, she stopped dead in her tracks at the threshold.
The feared head of the Moretti organization was lying back on his pillows, fast asleep, with a three-year-old child curled up asleep against his side, her small hand firmly wrapped around his thumb.
