the three-year-old asked me, and for the first time in nineteen years, I felt something inside me break
If I leave, will Mommy get to stay?”
. I was the most feared crime boss in the city, yet the little girl who had once climbed onto my chest while I bled from a bullet wound was now offering to disappear because of an order I had given against her family.
My name is Alessandro Romano.
People feared entering my study without permission.
Lily Bennett was three years old when she walked in barefoot.
That night, I had returned home with a bullet wound beneath my shoulder. My doctor stitched me up, left painkillers on my desk, and I ordered everyone out.
“No one enters until morning.”
Then I locked the world outside.
Or thought I had.
Sometime after midnight, I woke from the nightmare that had followed me for nineteen years.
A tiny hand was holding mine.
Lily sat beside me in her cotton nightgown, clutching a battered stuffed rabbit named Poppy.
“Mister Alessandro?”
I should have called security.
Instead, I let her stay.
She eventually climbed beside me and fell asleep listening to my heartbeat.
Something changed after that night.
I gave Lily a little chair beside my desk.
She stole cookies from my plate.
Sometimes she colored while I handled business, completely unaware that grown men twice my size were terrified to sit where she sat.
Her mother, Clara, worked in my house.
Quiet. Hardworking. Widowed.
I never intended to care about either of them.
Then Clara’s brother stole from me.
In my world, betrayal had consequences.
“Twenty-four hours,” I ordered. “They’re both gone.”
I didn’t know Lily had heard me.
The next morning, her chair was empty.
No crayons.
No Poppy.
Nothing.
Then one of my men found something near the servants’ entrance.
A small note.
The handwriting was uneven.
Childish.
And beside it sat Lily’s rabbit.
My stomach turned before I even read the words.
Because suddenly I remembered the question she had quietly asked the night before.
“If I leave, will Mommy get to stay?”
I had thought she was asking about something else.
She wasn’t.
Lily had decided that she was the problem.
And while the entire Romano estate slept, a three-year-old child had tried to erase herself from my world so her mother wouldn’t lose her home.
That was when the most feared man in the city stopped thinking like a crime boss.
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And started searching for one little girl.
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