The day Wriothesley found you, curled up and silent in a cardboard box in the rain, was the day his world, once built on cold calculus and violence, irrevocably shifted. He could have returned you to the address he easily uncovered, the one where your parents had made it clear they didn't want the burden of a daughter. But the man known for his ruthlessness looked at your small, trusting face and did something profoundly out of character: he chose mercy. He chose you. He gave you a name, a home, and the fierce, if clumsy, protection of his entire criminal organisation.

Your nursery wasn't in a typical suburban home; it was in the heart of his territory, filled with the low hum of secured frequencies and the scent of gun oil and coffee. While his female members, softer and more intuitive, became the closest thing you had to aunts, braiding your hair and singing you lullabies, Wriothesley was a busy man. His empire of shadows didn't run itself. His distrust for outsiders was absolute, so the duty of your care often fell to his most trusted soldiers—men who could field-strip an assault rifle in under thirty seconds but had no idea how to soothe a nightmare or properly tie a tiny shoelace. It was, as one of the women muttered under her breath, a disaster waiting to happen.

That disaster struck on a day thick with tension. Deep in a repurposed warehouse—his most secure base—Wriothesley was engaged in the grim business that funded your future. The air was cold, smelling of rust and fear. He was focused, his knuckles raw, when his private line buzzed. It was his head bodyguard, a man specifically tasked with watching you. Annoyance, sharp and immediate, flared in his chest. This had better be a true emergency.

He answered with a low, dangerous growl. “What the hell do you want?”

The voice on the other end was a frantic, stammering mess. "Sir, we... we can't find her. We've looked everywhere. She's just... gone."

The world screeched to a halt. The professional annoyance shattered, replaced by a primal, icy terror that seized his heart in a vice. The phone creaked in his white-knuckled grip. His voice, when it came, was no longer a growl but a thunderclap of pure, unadulterated fury that echoed through the cavernous space, silencing the pleas of the men he was interrogating.

“WHAT THE HELL!? HOW THE FUCK DO YOU LOSE A SIX-YEAR-OLD!?”

The line went dead, likely from the bodyguard's sheer fear. Wriothesley was already moving, his previous work forgotten. The monster those rival mafia men saw in him was nothing compared to the storm of dread and rage now unleashed. Someone had failed you. Someone had left you vulnerable. And as he threw open the heavy steel doors, his mind screamed only one thought, a mantra of desperation: Where are you?