Chapter 3 - The Mirror of the Soul
The fire in the hearth popped, sending a shower of golden sparks against the brass mesh screen.
Outside, the wind gusted with sudden, rattling violence against the leaded glass, but inside the circle of warm lamp light, the silence returned, thick and introspective.
Maisie did not look away from Damian. She tilted her head, her chestnut curls sliding across her small collar, studying the sharp lines of his face with an intensity that went far beyond her four years. She took in the dark stubble, the shadows beneath his gray eyes, the white line of an old knife scar cutting through his left eyebrow, and the open collar of his black shirt where the dark vines of his tattoos disappeared beneath the cloth.
She raised her small arm again.
Her tiny finger pointed directly at the center of his chest, right over his heart.
"Please don’t be sad anymore," she whispered.
The words did not merely enter the room; they struck Damian Marchetti like a high-caliber round through unarmored glass.
His entire body went completely, terrifyingly still.
The fountain pen in his right hand slipped from his fingers, rolling across the black oak desk before coming to rest against the edge of the open manila folder with a soft, hollow tap. The air in his lungs froze. The cold, unyielding armor he had worn like a second skin for eight years—the reputation that made hardened killers cross the street when his black sedan rolled down the avenue—fractured from the inside out.
"Who told you I’m sad?" Damian asked.
His voice was hoarse, the baritone stripped down to raw, scraped vocal cords. It was not the voice of the Don. It was the voice of a man standing in an empty cemetery in the middle of a blizzard.
Maisie lowered her finger, her small hands clasping together over her stomach.
"I can see it," she said softly.
"You can't see sadness, little girl," Damian muttered, though the denial sounded hollow even to his own ears.
"Yes, I can," Maisie insisted, taking half a step closer until her small shins bumped gently against the heavy wood of the desk. "You sit in this big room by yourself. The door is always shut. When you walk down the hall to the car, you don't look at the paintings, and you don't say hello to the dogs in the kennel. Mommy says people who don't smile on Christmas are carrying stones in their pockets."
Damian stared at her.
Stones in their pockets.
He looked down at his own calloused, ink-stained hands resting on the desk. They were the hands of a butcher, the hands of an architect of shadows, the hands of a man who had traded every scrap of peace for the illusion of control. And yet, this child—who had lived in the staff quarters of his own carriage house for six months without him ever learning her name—had looked at him through the cracks in his fortress and diagnosed the terminal condition of his soul in four words.
"What is your name?" Damian asked, his voice barely louder than the hum of the embers.
"Maisie," she answered cheerfully. "Maisie Hayes. I’m four and a half. In the spring, I’m going to have five fingers." She held up four fingers, then extended her thumb with an exaggerated flourish to prove her arithmetic.
"Maisie," Damian repeated, the name unfamiliar and clean on a tongue accustomed to Italian oaths and corporate aliases.
"And you’re Mr. Damian," she said. "Mommy told me I must always call you Mr. Marchetti and look at my shoes if you walk past. But your name on the letters downstairs says Damian."
"Your mother gave you good advice," Damian murmured, leaning forward slightly, resting his forearms on the desk, bringing himself down to her eye level. "You shouldn't be in this room, Maisie. If my men had seen you on the stairs—"
"The men with the black radios were eating pie in the kitchen," Maisie interrupted casually. "Mrs. Gable gave them the cherry one with the lattice crust. They didn't see me because I crawled behind the laundry carts."
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A dry, breathy sound escaped Damian’s throat. It took him two seconds to realize he was chuckling.
"My security team earns two hundred thousand dollars a year," Damian muttered to the empty air, shaking his head. "And they were compromised by a cherry pie."
