Chapter 3 - The Mirror of Blood
The boy who had been adjusting his ivory lapel suddenly looked up from his jacket, his dark brown eyes locking directly onto Dominic’s. There was no fear in the child’s gaze, only the solemn, evaluating scrutiny that Dominic himself gave to men who entered his boardroom.
For two long seconds, neither of them moved. The boy blinked slowly, his brow furrowing in a tiny, unconscious imitation of concentration.
Then, the child did something that shattered the last remnant of Dominic’s composure.
Without breaking eye contact, the boy lifted his right hand. He raised his fingers to his forehead, slid them through the thick, tousled waves of his dark brown hair, and brushed the unruly strands straight backward off his brow with a sharp, fluid flick of his wrist.
Dominic’s knees nearly gave out beneath him.
It was his gesture.
It was the exact, idiosyncratic nervous tick that Dominic had carried since he was seven years old—the habit his own father had tried to beat out of him at the boarding academy, the gesture Dominic made every time he sat before a ledger, every time he weighed a life-and-death decision, every time he had sat across the kitchen table from her, listening to her laugh over morning coffee. It was not a learned behavior; a child could not be taught to replicate the precise, unconscious micro-movements of a father he had never met. It was blood speaking through bone. It was nature mocking the absence of six lost years.
A sharp, audible intake of air scraped past Dominic’s teeth. The sound drew the attention of all four boys once more. They stopped their quiet bickering, turning their four identical faces toward the tall man in the dark suit.
Dominic did not care about the damp marble floor. He did not care that his five-thousand-dollar trousers were descending onto the polished stone. Slowly, with an agonizing deliberation that made his powerful frame tremble, Dominic Moretti lowered himself onto one knee.
He dropped down until his eyes were level with theirs.
Up close, the truth was an avalanche. The boy who had brushed his hair stood barely two feet away, looking at Dominic with calm, curious eyes. Dominic could see the faint constellation of tiny freckles across the bridge of the boy's straight nose—the exact pattern that Clara had carried across her own pale skin, visible only in the early morning sunlight.
Dominic’s large hands, capable of crushing an opponent's trachea with casual indifference, hovered in the cold air between them. They shook visibly. The knuckles, scarred from the fistfights of his youth, twitched as if desperate to reach out and touch the soft linen of the child's ivory blazer, yet terrified that the boy would vanish into mist the moment he made contact.
The scent of the children reached him: clean linen, sweet almond soap, and the faint, unmistakable warmth of young life. To a man who spent his days immersed in the metallic scent of firearms, wet concrete, and cold leather, it was a fragrance so pure it burned his lungs.
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The four boys exchanged a look between them—that silent, telepathic language shared by identical multiples.
"Mister," the boy with the sketchbook said softly, his head tilting to the side as he evaluated the kneeling giant. "Are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost."
