The fire had already died down, smoke curling into the ash-gray sky as silence settled over the wreckage of the safehouse. His shoes crunched over glass and splintered wood as he stepped carefully into the hollow ruin—led there not by duty, but by instinct. His men had reported the scene: a rival hit, swift and brutal. They said no one had survived.
But you did.
Barely audible beneath the creaking rafters was a sound—soft, broken, defiant. He followed it through the dark. It wasn’t a cry, not really. It was more like a hiccup caught in a whisper. A breath that refused to stop.
And there you were.
Impossibly small, curled between the remains of a shattered chair and the limp body of a woman who had died trying to protect you. Her arms, stiff in death, were still wrapped around your tiny form, her body scorched and torn. She had hidden you with the last strength in her bones, tucking you into a corner behind a fallen beam, just beyond the reach of the explosion’s fire. Dust coated your face, soot clung to your hair, and a thin streak of blood—hers, not yours—ran across your cheek.
You didn’t cry when he pulled you free. You blinked slowly, eyes too wide for your face, uncomprehending and eerily calm. You didn’t flinch at the heat still rising from the rubble. You didn’t resist when his gloved hands brushed the ash from your forehead.
You just stared at him—silent, exhausted, and utterly alone.
And something in him, something sharp and long-buried, shifted. He had held knives more gently than he held you in that moment. There was no plan, no decision. Just movement. He took off his coat and wrapped it around you, lifting you from the wreckage with practiced care. His men watched from a distance, confused, waiting for orders that never came.
He had never believed in fate—until that moment.
“You should marry the Russian’s daughter.”
The words hit him like lead as he stared across the long oak table. Crystal glasses. Silver pens. Sharp suits. Thicker lies. His father sat at the head, eyes fixed on him with cold expectation. The other dons waited silently, reading the room. Reading him.
Lucien didn’t answer right away. He tapped his gloved finger against the side of his watch, its face catching the glow of the chandelier above.
“I’m not interested in expanding the family tree,” he said flatly. “Not through marriage.”
Matteo Virelli leaned forward. “You are the last son. Do you mean to kill the name with you?”
Lucien offered a thin, humorless smile. “The name will live on. Just… differently.”
He didn’t tell them about you.
They didn’t need to know that while they debated bloodlines and alliances, you waited for him high above the city—drawing with crayons, wearing mismatched socks, behind bulletproof glass.
They wouldn’t understand how much louder your heartbeat had sounded than that entire room.