Chapter 4 - The Touch of the Small Ghost
A pair of small, flour-caked hands caught the vent of Dominic’s tailored wool suit jacket from behind.
The tug was not tentative; it was frantic, desperate, and delivered with all the kinetic strength a four-year-old child could summon from her small, shivering frame.
Dominic stopped.
His boots remained anchored to the marble, but his breath seized in his lungs. The fabric of his jacket strained against his broad shoulders as the little hands twisted into the expensive black wool, bunching the cloth into tight, white-dusted knots.
Rosa froze mid-step, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes widening in pure, paralyzed shock. Clara Vance remained on her knees in the flour, her tears pausing on her cheeks, her gaze locked onto the child’s back.
In fourteen months, Lucia had never touched him.
When Dominic returned from his trips, she would stand at the far end of the hallway, her hands clamped behind her back, her hazel eyes staring through him as if he were made of smoke. When he bent down to offer her an embrace, she would take two slow, deliberate steps backward into the shadow of the nursery door, her small body turning to stone until he gave up and walked away. The child psychologists he had flown in from Zurich, London, and Boston had all delivered the same sterile diagnosis: Severe selective mutism secondary to catastrophic trauma. Profound emotional detachment from the primary surviving parent.
Yet here she was, her small body pressed flat against the back of his thighs, her forehead resting against his belt line, her small hands refusing to let go of his coat.
Slowly, with an agonizing, glacial slowness that made the joints in his spine ache, Dominic turned around.
He did not pull his coat away. He rotated his heavy frame within the grip of her small fingers, bringing his broad chest around until he was looking down at the crown of her head.
Lucia was covered in flour.
White powder dusted the deep brown curls that fell past her shoulders; a smudge of gray paste was smeared across the collar of her pastel-blue dress. Her small chest was heaving in rapid, jagged gasps, her shoulders trembling with a violent, seismic force that vibrated through the fabric of his suit.
She did not look down.
For the first time since the night the glass shattered in the conservatory, Lucia tilted her chin straight up toward the ceiling. Her hazel eyes—wide, wet, and burning with a terrifying, unearthly intensity—locked directly onto her father’s pale gray gaze.
Dominic’s knees gave out.
The ruthless Don of the Five Families—the man whose name was whispered with dread in every shipping terminal from Newark to Brooklyn—sank directly onto the cold, flour-streaked slate of the kitchen floor. He did not care about the bespoke trousers; he did not care that his polished shoes were buried in dough. He lowered his towering frame until his face was six inches from hers, his large, scarred hands hovering in the air beside her arms, trembling with an emotion so vast, so terrifying, that his vision blurred at the edges.
"Lucia...?" Dominic whispered.
The word was a plea. It was a prayer dragged from the darkest, most broken corner of his soul.
The entire kitchen went completely, utterly silent. The hum of the industrial refrigerators seemed to fade into nothingness. Rosa Bennett stopped breathing; Clara Vance held her hands against her chest as if her heart might burst through her ribs.
Lucia did not blink. Her small, flour-white fingers uncurled from the back of his jacket, shifted forward, and clamped with ferocious, bruising strength onto both lapels of his open black suit coat, twisting the heavy wool against his chest.
Her small throat worked.
May you like
A dry, clicking sound emerged from her vocal cords—the sound of an iron gate that had been rusted shut for four hundred and twenty days grinding against its hinges.
Her small, chapped lips parted.
