Chapter 3 - Night Terrors and Porridge
The transition from a two-room flat above a dry cleaner’s to the northern wing of the Duca penthouse was not a transition of comfort; it was a transition of exile.
Her new bedroom was larger than the entire Sunnyside apartment. The walls were paneled in raw silk the color of river fog; the bed was a platform of oiled teak draped in Egyptian cotton so fine it felt like cool water against her work-roughened fingers. Through a set of double pocket doors lay Leo’s suite—a vast, curving nursery that looked more like a gallery of modern Scandinavian design than a place for a three-year-old child to play. There were no plastic toys, no primary colors, no cheerful cartoon figures painted on the walls. Everything was grey, white, and pale birch. It was quiet. It was expensive. It was completely dead.
By her third night in the house, Cameron had abandoned the teak bed entirely.
She sat on the floor of Leo’s nursery, her back pressed against the base of a white oak wardrobe, wearing an oversized flannel shirt she had insisted on keeping from Queens. Her legs were stretched out on the thick wool carpet, her bare feet cold despite the underfloor heating.
In the center of the room, inside a custom-built low bed shaped like a stylized ship, Leo was fighting for his life.
He wasn't awake.
His eyes were half-open, the whites showing yellowish in the moonlight that poured through the triple-glazed windows. His small legs kicked violently at the duvet, his teeth grinding together with a wet, splintering sound that made Cameron’s own jaw ache in sympathy.
"No," the boy whimpered. It was the only word he spoke with any clarity, over and over, like an incantation. "No. No. Red. No red."
Cameron didn't rush to him.
She had learned that on the first night, when her sudden movement had caused him to wake up swinging a heavy silver cup that had left a welt across her cheekbone. Trauma, she knew from her rotations at Elmhurst, had its own terrible rhythm. If you interrupted it too violently, the panic had nowhere to go except deeper into the muscle.
Instead, she began to hum.
It was an old, shapeless tune—something her grandmother had sung while frying salt pork on gas rings in County Mayo, half-lament and half-lullaby. Her voice was raspy, low, and completely lacking in performance. It was just sound. A rhythm to prove that the world was still turning, that the air was still breathable, that there was something in the dark that wasn't teeth.
She hummed three bars, paused, and spoke into the gloom.
"The bridge is still there, Leo," she said, her voice a flat, steady drone. "The water is under the bridge. The boats are tied to the posts. The yellow ones and the blue ones. Nobody is moving them."
Leo’s thrashing slowed. His heels hit the mattress with less force.
"No red," he whispered again, but the fury had drained out of it, leaving only a small, wet question.
"No red," Cameron agreed softly. "Only blue. Only the water. Come here."
She didn't reach for him. She held out her hands, palms up, resting on her knees.
The boy rolled over. For a long, agonizing minute, he stared at her from the shadows of his wooden ship, his small chest rising and falling like a bellows. Then, with the slow, uncertain movement of a wounded animal testing a snare, he crawled out from beneath the duvet.
He didn't walk. He crawled on his hands and knees across the cold expanse of the wool rug until his small, warm forehead pressed directly against Cameron’s shin.
She didn't scoop him up. She simply reached down and laid one hand flat against his back, feeling the frantic, hummingbird flutter of his heart beneath his ribs.
"Big feelings," she murmured.
Leo let out a long, shuddering breath that sounded like a tire deflating. He crawled into her lap, twisting his small frame until his back was against her stomach and his head was tucked under her chin. He didn't cry this time. He just took her right index finger into his fist and squeezed it with everything he had.
A floorboard creaked in the arched entryway.
Cameron didn't look up immediately. She waited until Leo’s breathing smoothed out into the slow, heavy cadence of true sleep before she raised her chin.
Matteo stood in the doorway.
He was wearing black trousers and an unbuttoned black silk shirt over a grey undershirt. His feet were bare. In the dim, blue-grey light from the city below, he looked less like an untouchable crime lord and more like a ghost haunting his own battlements. His dark hair was messy, as though he had spent the last three hours running his hands through it, and the circles beneath his eyes were dark as bruises.
He looked at Cameron on the floor. He looked at his son sleeping in her lap.
"He called for Elena," Matteo said. His voice was barely a whisper, but it cut through the room like a razor through silk. "Didn't he?"
"No," Cameron said softly. "He didn't."
Matteo leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. He crossed his arms over his chest—not defensively, but with the posture of a man who was holding his own ribs together.
"He said 'red,'" Cameron continued, keeping her hand steady on Leo’s back. "What is red, Mr. Duca?"
Matteo was silent for so long that Cameron thought he might turn and walk away. A siren wailed far down on West Street, three short bursts from an ambulance that faded toward the Holland Tunnel.
"Her coat," Matteo said finally.
The words seemed to cost him an enormous, physical effort. Cameron could see the muscle in his jaw jumping beneath the skin.
"Elena had an Italian coat," he said, staring at the floor between them. "Heavy wool. The color of pomegranate seeds. She was wearing it on the terrace at our house in Old Westbury. Leo was sitting on the stone balustrade. He was two years old. He was eating an apple."
He stopped. He took a slow, deep breath through his nose.
"The shooter was four hundred yards away, on the ridge above the polo fields. He was using a Remington seven-hundred with a suppressed barrel. The bullet passed through the glass of the greenhouse, through the back of her neck, and out through her throat."
Cameron felt a cold, prickling sensation wash over the back of her arms.
"Leo was covered in it," Matteo whispered. "Her blood. The wool of the coat. He was holding a piece of her collar when my security team dragged him into the wine cellar. He wouldn't let go of the fabric. They had to cut it out of his fingers with a pair of shears."
Cameron looked down at the boy in her lap.
The curls at the back of his neck were damp with sweat. His small, perfect hand was still gripping her finger so tightly that the nail was turning white.
*No red.*
*He wasn't throwing tantrums,* Cameron thought, a profound, sickening wave of understanding washing over her. *He was trying to wash the color off the world.*
"Who was the shooter?" Cameron asked quietly.
"A dead man," Matteo replied. His voice didn't contain rage; it was completely flat, completely empty, which made it ten times more terrifying. "He survived for fourteen hours after we found him in an auto repair shop in Elizabeth. But he didn't pull the trigger on his own initiative. He was paid."
"By whom?"
Matteo looked up. His eyes met hers in the darkness of the nursery.
"That," he said softly, "is why you are not allowed to take my son onto the terrace, Miss Jenkins. That is why the windows in this room are three inches of laminated polycarbonate. And that is why there are six men with submachine guns sitting in the basement of this building who would peel the skin from your back if you ever opened that front door without my clearance."
He uncrossed his arms and stepped into the room.
He walked with unnatural silence, his bare feet making no sound against the wool rug. He stopped two feet away from where Cameron sat on the floor, looking down at them.
For a moment, he reached down—his large, scarred hand hesitating in the air above Leo’s curls. His fingers twitched, as if he wanted to touch the child’s hair, to feel the warmth of his skull, to assure himself that the boy was still breathing.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he curled his fingers into a fist and pulled his hand back.
"He hates me," Matteo said. It was not a plea for contradiction. It was a cold assessment of a ledger balance.
"He doesn't hate you," Cameron said.
"He looks at my face and he sees the day she died," Matteo said. "I brought the war to that house. I knew Valenti was moving shipments through Newark. I knew the council was fracturing. I should have sent them to Switzerland in November. I kept them here because I was arrogant. Because I believed no one would dare touch a Duca on Long Island."
"He doesn't see the war, Mr. Duca," Cameron said, her voice rising slightly, firm and clear in the quiet nursery. "He's three. He doesn't know what Long Island is, and he doesn't know what a council is. He sees a man who looks like him, who smells like the house he used to have, and who won't touch him because he’s terrified he’ll break him."
Matteo’s jaw tightened. "You know nothing about my family."
"I know about men who think they're made of iron," Cameron replied, her grey eyes flashing in the gloom. "My father was a longshoreman in Red Hook before he died of cirrhosis. Every time he lost his temper, he bought me a doll. Every time he felt guilty, he stayed out until four in the morning so he wouldn't have to look at my mother’s eyes. You think you're protecting Leo by keeping your hands off him? You're just making him think the poison is his fault."
Matteo stood over her, his tall frame blocking the moonlight, casting a massive, predatory shadow across the floor.
"You are an employee, Cameron," he said, the baritone dropping into a register that made the hairs on her neck stand up. "Do not confuse my necessity with intimacy."
"Then fire me," she said instantly. She didn't flinch. She didn't drop her gaze. "Write the check for my mother’s hospital, call your placement service, and find nanny number fifteen. See if she’ll sit on this floor while your son kicks her teeth in."
They stared at each other.
The air between them was thick, electric, and dangerous. Cameron could hear the sound of his breathing—deep, controlled, the breath of a hunter waiting for a target to clear the brush. She realized, with a sudden, sharp jolt in the pit of her stomach, that she was not afraid of him. She was terrified of what he could do to her mother, yes; she was terrified of the violence that circled this tower like a school of sharks. But of the man himself?
No. He was just another broken man standing in a very high room, bleedings internally while trying to pretend the blood was just scotch.
Matteo didn't speak.
Instead, he did something that made Cameron’s breath catch in her throat.
Very slowly, he sank onto one knee.
He didn't sit on the floor—his pride would not allow that—but he brought his face down until he was level with her. His eyes searched hers, moving from her temple, down to the small, yellowing bruise on her collarbone where Leo’s train had struck her, and then down to his son’s face.
"He ate the porridge this morning," Matteo said.
The shift in his tone was so sudden Cameron blinked.
"What?"
"The chef told me," Matteo murmured, his eyes still fixed on the boy’s curls. "He has refused solid food for five days. This morning, he ate four spoons of steel-cut oats. With brown sugar."
"He likes the sugar," Cameron said, her voice softening despite herself. "You have to put it in a circle around the edge of the bowl. He calls it the 'fence.' He won't eat the middle until the fence is gone."
A minute, almost imperceptible twitch occurred at the corner of Matteo’s mouth.
It wasn't a smile—men like Matteo Duca didn't smile without a contract—but it was the memory of one.
"His mother did that," Matteo said. "When she was small. In Palermo."
He reached out again.
This time, he didn't pull his hand back.
His long, calloused index finger moved forward through the moonlight and lightly, incredibly gently, traced the line of Leo’s small, curved ear. He didn't wake the child. He just touched him—a touch so light it wouldn't have disturbed a spider’s web.
Then, before Cameron could move, his finger shifted.
The back of his knuckles brushed against the side of Cameron’s neck.
It lasted for less than half a second. It was likely accidental—a mere consequence of how close she was holding the child to her own throat. But where his skin met hers, a jolt of heat crackled straight down Cameron’s spine, so intense and unexpected that her lips parted in a silent, startled gasp.
His knuckles were rough, scarred across the bone, but his skin was burning hot.
Matteo froze. His eyes flicked from his son’s hair up to Cameron’s face.
In the darkness, his pale eyes were wide, dark pupils swallowing the ice. He looked at her mouth. He looked at the pulse point fluttering frantically at the base of her throat, right where his fingers had grazed her.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed.
"Mr. Duca," Cameron whispered, her voice barely a thread.
Matteo pulled his hand back as if he had touched a live high-voltage cable.
He stood up in one smooth, lethal movement, towering over her once more. The coldness returned to his face like a mask dropping into place, iron-hard and impenetrable.
"The physician arrives at eight tomorrow morning for his developmental review," Matteo said, his voice entirely devoid of the tenderness that had been there three seconds ago. "Make sure the boy is dressed in something that does not look like he survived an explosion."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the nursery.
May you like
Cameron sat on the floor in the dark, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, Leo’s weight warm and heavy against her chest, and the skin on the side of her neck burning as though she had been marked with a brand.
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