Chapter 1 - The Weight of 3:12 A.M.The floor of the empty nursery was cold, but the chill spreading through my chest was far worse.
My phone slipped from my hand, the glass screen cracking as it hit the dark hardwood near the vacant crib. The video had looped three times, but those final words from Grace continued to echo off the hand-painted walls where small pink butterflies danced beneath the soft recessed lighting: “You didn't lose your phone, Vincent. You made a choice.”
Twelve years.
Twelve years she had stood by my side while I built the Romano syndicate from a ruthless street coalition into an empire controlling six hundred men, dozens of commercial shipping terminals, and political favors stretching from Manhattan to Albany. She had stitched my shoulder in a dark kitchen when a rival crew put a bullet through my coat. She had attended four funerals of my lieutenants without flinching, playing the quiet, dignified Donna of New York while I bathed the streets in blood to secure our reign.
And in return, I had abandoned her in a sterile hospital room while our five-pound daughter fought for every breath.
"Boss?"
My chief adviser, Frank, stood in the doorway of the nursery. His face was gray, his worn hands folded tightly over his stomach. He was fifty-eight years old, a veteran who had served my father before me, a man who had never seen me fall to my knees in forty-three years of life.
"Get up, Vincent," Frank said softly, his voice trembling with a mixture of profound disappointment and quiet alarm. "You look like a ghost."
I didn't get up. I sat on the floor of the nursery, holding the small pink satin ribbon that Grace had left inside the empty crib.
"She knew for six months, Frank," I rasped out, my voice sounding hollow, broken, and completely stripped of the sovereign power that usually commanded rooms. "Six months she sat across from me at breakfast knowing I was seeing Vanessa. And she didn't say a word because she thought... she thought when the baby came, I would choose them."
Frank let out a long, heavy sigh, stepping into the room and leaning against the wooden railing of the crib.
"You spent four hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a diamond necklace in Chicago, Vincent," Frank stated flatly, every word dropped into the quiet nursery like a slab of cold iron. "You bought a sports car for a thirty-year-old woman while your wife was lying in an ICU bed asking the nurses why her husband wasn't answering his phone."
"I thought I had time!" I roared, slamming my fist against the floorboards, my knuckles splitting against the wood. "The doctor said seven weeks! He said the premature risk was low!"
"The doctor warned you three days before you boarded the private jet," Frank countered, his eyes hardening. "And when I called you at 11:42 p.m. to tell you her water had broken, you told me you were in the middle of a dinner meeting."
I squeezed my eyes shut as the sickening memory flooded back. I hadn't been in a meeting. I had been sitting at a corner table in a private club in Chicago, holding a glass of forty-year-old scotch while Vanessa blew out thirty candles on a four-tier cake. When my phone had buzzed, Vanessa had wrapped her manicured fingers around my wrist, leaning in close, her perfume sickly sweet against my neck, whispering that if I left her party, she would make sure every tabloid in New York knew about us.
I had stayed. I had chosen an eleven-month distraction over twelve years of devotion.
My phone, lying cracked on the floor, began to vibrate again.
The ringtone broke the heavy silence of the nursery.
I reached out, my trembling fingers scooping up the device. The caller ID displayed an unlisted Manhattan legal office: VANCE & ASSOCIATES — ATTORNEYS AT LAW.
I pressed the screen to my ear, my chest heaving as I forced my voice into a rough, commanding register. "Who is this?"
"Mr. Romano," a sharp, composed baritone voice answered smoothly through the speaker. "My name is Richard Vance. I represent your wife, Grace Romano."
"Where is she?" I demanded, standing up so fast my vision blurred. "Where is my wife, Vance? If you are holding her or hiding my daughter—"
"I am not holding anyone, Mr. Romano," Vance interrupted coolly. "Your wife is in a secure private medical facility under full legal protection. But before you attempt to deploy your six hundred men to tear New York apart looking for her, there is something you need to understand."
I gripped the phone until the plastic casing groaned. "Speak."
"Mrs. Romano has filed for an emergency interlocutory decree," Vance revealed deadpan. "She has surrendered her right to any portion of your four-billion-dollar corporate estate. She wants no money, no real estate, and no monthly maintenance."
My heart took a violent, sickening plunge. "What does she want?"
"She has legally surrendered full parental custody of Lily Romano to the State of New York's private ward trust," Vance delivered the blow with surgical precision. "And she has signed an order specifying that until you sign a full, unconditional surrender of your criminal syndicate interests, neither you nor your organization will be granted access to the neonatal intensive care unit."
The room spun. My knees buckled, and I grabbed the wooden edge of the crib to keep from collapsing flat onto the floorboards.
May you like
"She... she put our daughter in a state trust?" I choked out.
"She put your daughter out of your reach, Mr. Romano," Vance replied flatly. "Because as long as you are the Don of the Romano family, your child is a target. Grace has decided that if you want to be a mafia boss, you can be one alone."
Related Stories
