Chapter 2
PART 2
Hart Flowers sat on the corner of Mercer and Eighth, squeezed between a pawn shop and a boarded-up bakery. By day, it was probably charming. The painted sign had curling blue letters. Window boxes hung beneath the front glass. Someone had once planted lavender in clay pots by the entrance.
By midnight, it looked like a murder scene.
The front window had been smashed inward. White roses lay crushed across the sidewalk, their petals wet with rain and blood. The door hung open. A bell above it rang weakly in the wind, a tiny cheerful sound that made Lily cover her ears.
“Mama,” she whispered.
Dominic stepped out first. “Stay in the car.”
“No!” Lily tried to climb after him. “I have to see her!”
Dominic caught her gently but firmly. “You already saved her by finding me. Now let me do my part.”
She stared at him, trembling, then nodded.
Frank stayed beside the car with one hand inside his jacket. Dominic entered the flower shop with two men behind him.
The smell hit him first: roses, wet soil, cheap bleach, and blood.
Grace Hart lay behind the counter.
She was young, maybe thirty-one, with dark hair pasted to her cheek and one hand still curled around a pair of pruning shears. Even unconscious, she looked as if she had fought until her body gave out. There were broken vases everywhere. A cash register had been ripped open. A framed photograph of Lily in a school uniform lay cracked near Grace’s shoulder.
Dominic crouched beside her.
For one terrifying second, he could not move.
Grace had Rose’s mouth.
Not similar. Not close. Rose’s exact mouth. The same curve at the top lip. The same stubborn line even in pain.
“God help me,” Dominic whispered.
Dr. Wallace burst through the door with his medical bag, coat thrown over pajamas. He had pulled bullets out of men in kitchens, stitched knife wounds under restaurant tables, and lied to police more times than he cared to remember. But when he saw Dominic’s face, he did not ask questions.
“Move,” the doctor said.
Dominic moved.
Wallace worked fast, checking Grace’s pulse, pupils, ribs, breathing. “She’s alive. Head trauma, possible internal bleeding. She needs surgery now.”
“Can she travel?”
“She has to.”
Dominic turned to his men. “Bring the stretcher.”
As they lifted Grace carefully, something slipped from beneath her blouse and hit the floor.
A second locket.
Dominic picked it up.
This one was not silver. It was cheap brass, worn smooth by years of touch. Inside was a tiny hospital bracelet, folded to fit. The name had faded, but Dominic could still read part of it.
Baby Girl Moretti.
His knees nearly buckled.
Wallace noticed. “Dominic?”
“Save her,” Dominic said, voice rough. “Whatever it takes.”
They carried Grace into the rain.
Lily saw her mother on the stretcher and screamed.
Dominic caught the child before she could run into the street. She fought him, tiny fists pounding his chest, crying for her mother in a voice so broken it made one of Dominic’s hardened men turn away.
“She’s breathing,” Dominic told her. “Look at me, Lily. She is breathing.”
“Will she die?”
“Not tonight.”
“You said you promise.”
“I remember.”
At St. Catherine’s Hospital, doors opened before Dominic reached them. Wallace had made calls. Money had made the rest. Nurses moved Grace into surgery while Lily stood in the hallway wearing Dominic’s overcoat like a blanket.
Dominic sat beside her on a plastic chair too small for a man of his size.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then Lily asked, “Are you a bad man?”
The question landed harder than an accusation.
Dominic looked at his bloody hands. “I have been.”
“But you’re helping.”
“Bad men can still do one right thing.”
“My mama says people are more than the worst thing they’ve done.”
Dominic closed his eyes.
Rose used to say that.
Lily leaned against his arm, exhausted. “Mama cries sometimes when she looks at the locket. She says my grandma had brave eyes.”
Dominic swallowed. “Did she tell you your grandmother’s name?”
“Rose.”
The hallway stretched around him, bright and sterile and merciless.
Before he could ask another question, Carlo appeared at the end of the corridor. Rain dripped from his coat. His expression was grim.
“We found the two who hit the shop,” Carlo said quietly. “Eddie Knox and Luis Marin. Harbor Crew boys. They were bragging at O’Malley’s that they collected a dead woman’s necklace.”
Dominic’s eyes darkened. “Where are they?”
“Warehouse on Pier 6.”
“Alive?”
“For now.”
Dominic stood, but Lily grabbed his sleeve again.
“Don’t leave.”
The fear in her voice stopped him.
Dominic looked down at her, then at the surgery doors. For thirty years, when pain came near him, he answered it with violence because violence was easier than grief. But Lily was watching him with Rose’s eyes and Grace’s stubborn mouth, and suddenly he understood that every choice he made tonight would teach this child who he really was.
He crouched before her. “I need to find out who hurt your mother and why. I will come back before she wakes up.”
“How do I know?”
He took Rose’s locket from his pocket and placed it in Lily’s hands.
“Because you’re holding my heart,” he said.
Lily stared at the locket, then nodded solemnly.
Dominic walked away with Carlo.
In the elevator, Carlo finally spoke. “Dom, there’s something else.”
Dominic did not turn.
“One of the nurses at the flower shop saw a black town car leave the block before the Harbor boys went in. She only saw the plate for a second.”
“And?”
Carlo hesitated. “It was registered to Anthony.”
Dominic closed his eyes.
Blood could be family.
Blood could also be betrayal.
May you like
When the elevator doors opened, Dominic stepped into the lobby no longer as a grieving widower chasing a ghost.
He stepped out as a grandfather whose family had tried to erase a child.
