Chapter 4 - What the Ashes Kept
The room fell into a silence so profound that the ticking of the clock sounded like gunfire.
"You're lying," Alina whispered, though the certainty had fled from her eyes. "He was a soldier. He was your father's enforcer. You don't let enforcers just walk away."
"Marco wasn't just a soldier," Damon snarled, a sudden, violent crack appearing in his icy facade. He stepped closer, closing the distance between them until Alina could feel the heat radiating from him. "He was my brother. Not by blood, but by every oath that mattered. We grew up in the same gutter in the North End. When my father beat me until I couldn't stand, Marco was the one who dragged me into the cellar and brought me ice. When the Rossi family tried to put two bullets in my spine behind the old bakery, Marco took one in the shoulder for me!"
He reached up, ripping his tie loose with a sudden, vicious yank, unbuttoning the top three buttons of his white dress shirt.
He pulled the collar down.
Across his collarbone, stretching down over his left breast, was a horrific, puckered mass of scar tissue—the undeniable, silver-white signature of a third-degree chemical burn.
Alina pressed her hand to her mouth, a gasp tearing from her throat.
"I was there, Alina," Damon said, his chest rising and falling heavily. "I was inside the warehouse when the charges blew. Marco had uncovered a ledger. He found out that someone in our own high council had been selling our routes to the Tornero syndicate—the same people who flooded our neighborhoods with synthetic fentanyl. Marco called me. He said, *'Damon, they know I have the book. They're coming.'*"
Damon’s eyes glistened with unshed tears, an expression of profound, devastating grief that shattered any illusion of the ruthless mafia boss.
"I drove through four red lights. I got there just as the perimeter charges went off. The doors were chained from the outside with heavy marine links. I kicked through a window. I found him pinned beneath a collapsed crane support."
Damon looked away, his jaw working as if chewing on glass.
"The fire was already on us. Marco was bleeding out from his femoral artery. He pushed me away. He looked at me, with his leg crushed to dust, and he handed me the broken-wing pendant from his neck. The matching one he had made for the baby. He said, *'Save my wife. Save my little girl. If you die here, Damon, no one protects them.'*"
A tear finally escaped Damon’s eye, tracking through the rough stubble of his cheek.
"The roof collapsed. It dropped a wall of burning timbers between us. I tried to claw through the fire with my bare hands. Dante and three of my men had to tackle me, drag me out through the glass while my skin burned off my chest. By the time the fire trucks arrived, there was nothing left."
Alina’s knees gave out completely.
She didn't hit the floor. Damon caught her.
His large, calloused hands gripped her shoulders, breaking her fall with surprising gentleness, holding her upright as her entire body dissolved into racking, catastrophic sobs. The three years of paranoia, the cold nights of hunger, the terror of every police siren, the hatred she had nurtured like a protective armor against the world—all of it shattered into dust.
"I went to your apartment the next morning," Damon whispered, holding her steady in the center of the vast, dim study. "The door was kicked in. The rooms were ransacked. The landlord said you had vanished into the night with a single suitcase. I thought the Torneros had taken you. I thought they had murdered you and Marco's unborn child and dumped your bodies in the Atlantic."
"I... I thought it was you," Alina wept against his chest, her hands clutching the lapels of his suit jacket. "The landlord told me... he said men in black suits were asking for Marco, that the boss wanted to clean house. I had no family. No one to call. I took my maiden name. I took the train as far as my cash would take me. And when the money ran out, when Mia was two... I came back to the city under forged papers. I thought... I thought the safest place to hide from the devil was right under his roof, cleaning his floors where he would never look at my face."
Damon let out a low, bitter sound that was half-laugh, half-groan.
"The devil," he murmured. "Marco would have laughed his head off at that."
He gently eased her back, looking down at her tear-stained face. He reached out, his thumb brushing a tear from her cheek with an unexpected, breathtaking tenderness.
May you like
"You're done running, Alina," Damon said, his voice regaining its steel, but now infused with a solemn, sacred vow. "You and Mia are in the only house on this coast that can protect you. Because the man who burned Pier 42 is still alive. And if he finds out Marco left a daughter behind, he will burn this city to ash to kill her."
***
