Chapter 6
Maeve stopped breathing.
I saw it happen.
Her face went white, her hand tightened on Noah’s backpack, and for one sharp second she looked less like a grown woman and more like the terrified eight-year-old girl who survived a family war she never understood.
“Noah,” she whispered. “What red book?”
Her son blinked, confused by the fear in her voice.
“The one Nana Nora showed me.”
Maeve knelt in front of him.
“My mother died before you were born.”
Noah shook his head.
“Not that Nana. Picture Nana.”
Mrs. Ruiz crossed herself.
Maeve looked at me.
“I don’t know what he means.”
Noah slid off the couch and walked to his little backpack.
He pulled out a folded drawing.
A red rectangle under a house.
A stick woman with yellow hair.
A little boy.
And a gray stone.
Maeve covered her mouth.
“That’s my grandfather’s house.”
I looked at Santino.
“Where?”
“Bridgeport,” Maeve said. “But it burned eighteen years ago.”
“Did it burn completely?”
She shook her head slowly.
“The front did. The back foundation remained. The city fenced it.”
Santino was already on the phone.
I looked at Maeve.
“Did you ever take Noah there?”
“Once. Last year. I wanted him to know where we came from. I thought it was just ruins.”
Noah held up the drawing.
“Picture Nana said the red book sleeps under the floor.”
Maeve’s eyes filled.
“He talks to my mother’s photograph sometimes,” she whispered. “I thought he was making stories.”
Children hear things adults bury.
I had learned that too late in life.
Agent Pierce arrived from the street with another officer.
When I told him, his expression sharpened.
“We go now.”
Maeve stood.
“I’m coming.”
“No,” I said.
Her eyes flashed.
“It’s my family.”
“And Dominic may be going there too.”
“That’s exactly why I’m coming.”
Noah grabbed her leg.
“Mommy, don’t go.”
Her face broke.
I crouched in front of him.
“Noah.”
He looked at me with wide, suspicious eyes.
“Are you bad?”
Honest question.
Fair question.
“Sometimes,” I said.
Maeve looked startled.
Noah frowned.
“But are you bad to mommies?”
“No.”
“Are you bad to kids?”
“No.”
He studied me.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He held out his tiny dinosaur backpack.
“Then bring Mommy back.”
Maeve started crying.
I took the backpack like it was a sacred oath.
“I will.”
Mrs. Ruiz agreed to stay with Noah at the guarded guest house.
Maeve still insisted on coming.
I stopped arguing because courage is not something you respect only when it is convenient.
We drove to Bridgeport under a sky heavy with storm clouds.
Pierce followed.
Santino sat beside me.
Maeve sat in the back, silent, both hands clenched in her lap.
After a while, she said, “My father was not a soldier.”
I looked at her in the mirror.
“He ran a printing shop. Wedding invitations. Funeral cards. Church flyers. He hated guns.”
Her voice trembled.
“But after your father died, people called him a killer. Then our windows were broken. Then the fires started.”
I said nothing.
What apology could hold eighteen years?
She continued.
“My mother took us to three different places in one week. Men still found us. My brother Finn was five. He kept asking when we could go home.”
I remembered the O’Donnell boy.
Not as a person.
As a name on an old list.
Missing.
Presumed dead.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
Maeve looked out the window.
“I don’t know.”
The words were flat.
Too practiced.
“We got separated during the last fire. My mother shoved me through a basement window. She went back for Finn. I never saw either of them again.”
My hand tightened on the wheel.
I had ordered men to stop the fires once I took over.
But by then, the damage had already been done.
By then, I had believed the O’Donnells started it.
I had been wrong.
Wrong in ways that left children motherless.
When we reached the burned house, the fence had been cut.
Fresh.
Pierce drew his weapon.
Santino did too.
Maeve whispered, “Dominic.”
We moved through the weeds and broken concrete.
The back foundation remained, blackened but standing waist-high.
Inside, the floor was mostly gone.
Maeve pointed to the corner.
“That was the kitchen.”
Noah’s drawing showed a gray stone.
There were dozens.
Then Maeve stepped toward one near the old fireplace.
“My grandfather kept money under a loose brick.”
Santino lifted it.
Nothing.
Maeve dropped to her knees and brushed ash and dirt aside.
Her fingers found a metal ring.
A small trapdoor.
Hidden beneath warped boards.
She pulled.
It opened with a groan.
Inside was a red leather ledger wrapped in oilcloth.
Maeve touched it like it might vanish.
Pierce photographed it.
Then lifted it carefully.
Before he could open it, a gun clicked behind us.
Dominic’s voice shook.
“Give me the book.”
I turned slowly.
Dominic stood near the fence with a pistol in both hands.
His suit was gone.
He wore a dark hoodie, wet hair stuck to his forehead, eyes wild.
Maeve froze.
Santino aimed at him.
Pierce aimed too.
Dominic shouted, “Drop them!”
No one did.
I kept my voice calm.
“Dominic, put it down.”
“No. You don’t get to take this too.”
“You don’t know what’s in that ledger.”
“Mama does.”
“Where is she?”
His mouth trembled.
“She left me.”
There it was.
The child under the cruelty.
Abandoned by the mother who had used him as a weapon.
For a second, I almost pitied him.
Then his gun shifted toward Maeve.
Pity died.
“She ruined everything,” he said.
I stepped in front of her.
“No. Your mother did.”
“Stop saying that!”
“Francesca killed your future before you ever had one.”
His eyes filled.
“She said the club was mine.”
“She lied.”
“She said Grandpa wanted me to have it.”
“The will says otherwise.”
Dominic shook his head violently.
“No.”
“Put the gun down, and you can still tell the truth.”
He laughed, broken and high.
“Truth? In this family?”
Maeve stepped around me.
I grabbed her arm gently.
She shook me off.
“Dominic,” she said. “My son is four.”
His gun wavered.
“You used his medicine to hurt me. You took money I needed to keep him breathing. Whatever your mother promised you, look at what you became while waiting for it.”
Dominic’s face crumpled.
“Shut up.”
“You are not powerful,” she said. “You are a scared little boy hurting people poorer than you because your mother made you feel cheated.”
His hand shook.
For one dangerous second, I thought he would shoot.
Then a voice came from behind the fence.
“Dominic.”
Francesca stepped out from the shadows.
Rain began falling around her.
She looked at her son with disgust.
“Why are you still talking?”
Dominic turned.
“Mama?”
She lifted her own gun.
Not at us.
At him.
My blood went cold.
“Francesca,” I said.
She smiled at me.
“If he talks, he ruins me.”
May you like
Dominic whispered, “Mama, what are you doing?”
Maeve screamed as Francesca fired.
