Chapter 6 - Words from Beyond the Grave
The garden seemed to hold its breath. The breeze died down completely, leaving the leaves of the tea roses hanging motionless in the golden light.
Luca took half a step backward, his hand trembling as he holstered his weapon. He had stood beside Damian through gunfights in abandoned warehouses, through car chases on rain-slicked bridges, through the brutal interrogation of men who had betrayed their oaths. He had never seen his Don look like this.
Damian Romano looked as though he had just witnessed an angel descend into a slaughterhouse.
Before Luca could speak, the little girl stirred against Damian’s chest.
Mia’s brow furrowed slightly in her sleep. Her tiny fingers, still hooked into the fabric of his black shirt, tightened their grip. She shifted her head, her cheek sliding across the dark ink of his eagle tattoo, her soft curls brushing against his collarbone once more.
Her eyelids did not open. She remained suspended in that deep, absolute exhaustion that only children and the dying experience.
Her tiny lips parted.
In the dead quiet of the private garden, her voice was barely louder than the rustle of a falling leaf:
"Your daddy said you’d keep me safe."
Damian stopped breathing.
His heart ceased its rhythm for an entire, agonizing second. The air in his lungs turned to ice. His slate-gray eyes dilated until they were nearly black, his spine locking against the stone bench as if an electric current had shot through his central nervous system.
Your daddy.
Carmine Romano had been dead for four years. His ashes were sealed inside the marble mausoleum at Gate of Heaven Cemetery.
Yet the child had not said a man. She had not said my mother.
She had spoken the word with the pure, unquestioning certainty of a message delivered by hand.
Luca let out a choked, ragged gasp, stumbling back two full paces until his shoulder struck the dense leaves of the boxwood hedge. His face had gone from pale to completely translucent, his jaw hanging open as he stared at the toddler sleeping on the lap of the most ruthless man in New York.
"Boss..." Luca whispered, his voice cracking into a high, terrified rasp. "What... what did she just say?"
Damian did not answer him.
He could not.
Slowly, agonizingly, Damian lowered his head. He looked down at the silver watch in his right hand. The second hand continued its steady, relentless sweep across the porcelain dial.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
It was wound.
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A watch that had been lost in the fire on the Pulaski Skyway four years ago had been wound this morning.
And the girl who carried it was sleeping on his chest, having walked through a sewer pipe with her rabbit, bearing an order from a dead king.
