Chapter 5 - A Crack in the Armor
The word hung in the humid air of the conservatory like a gunshot.
Spin.
It was the first time Milo had spoken in twenty-four months.
Nadia staggered backward as if she had been physically struck, her hands flying to her mouth. Tears spilled over her eyelashes instantly, hot and blinding. She dropped to her knees beside her son, grabbing his shoulders.
“Milo? Milo, baby, did you—did you just talk? Oh, dear God, you talked—”
The boy looked at his mother with his usual solemn expression, unaffected by the seismic weight of what he had just done, and simply turned back to look at Salvatore.
Salvatore sat frozen in his chair. The blood roared in his ears. He had faced down hitmen, survived betrayal, stared into the barrel of a pistol, and walked through a world built on blood and terror without flinching. But this—this small, fragile syllable dropped by a broken child in a glass greenhouse—hit him somewhere deep behind his ribs, cracking open a vault he had kept sealed since the day his legs went dark.
His chest heaved. He gripped the metal hand rims of his wheelchair so hard his knuckles turned white.
Without a word, Salvatore shoved his weight forward, gripping the wheels and spinning the chair in a sharp, controlled 180-degree turn, gravel crunching faintly beneath the casters as he pivoted back toward them.
Milo’s eyes widened. A tiny, fleeting flicker of a smile—the first Salvatore had ever seen on that pale face—touched the corners of the boy’s mouth.
Salvatore looked down at the paper still clutched in his hand, then up at Nadia, whose face was wet with tears of pure shock and gratitude.
“Get him out of the drafts,” Salvatore rasped, his voice uncharacteristically rough around the edges. He didn’t wait for an answer. He spun his chair again and rolled away down the stone corridor, his broad shoulders hunched, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Back in his office, Salvatore slammed the doors shut.
He rolled over to his desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and stared at the dark, matte finish of his Sig Sauer pistol. For months, that gun had been his only true companion—a symbol of control, a lethal insurance policy against a world that had discarded him.
He reached in, picked it up, and weighed it in his palm.
May you like
Then, with a sudden, violent motion, he tossed the weapon back into the drawer, shoved it shut, and picked up the wooden soldier from where it stood beside the reports.
He set the soldier right in the center of his desk, where the afternoon sun cut a sharp, golden line across the mahogany.
