Chapter 2 - THE NAME HE NEVER EXPECTED TO HEAR
“Julian.”
The name left my lips as a whisper, but it hit that kitchen like a gunshot.
Kieran Blackwood did not move. He did not blink. For a moment, I wasn’t sure he was even breathing. The man who could silence a room full of armed men with a single look stood perfectly still beneath the warm glow of the pendant lights, as if I had reached into his chest and wrapped my hand around something he had buried a long time ago.
“Say that again,” he said.
His voice was barely a sound.
“Julian,” I repeated, my fingers trembling around my phone. “That’s who I was talking to. His name is Julian Torres. Everyone calls him Jules.”
“Him.”
“My son.”
The word hung between us.
I had worked in this house for eighteen months. My employment file listed me as single, no dependents, no emergency contact. I had made sure of that. Every lie in that file was a brick in the wall I had built to keep my little boy safe.
Now the wall was cracking, and the man standing in front of me looked like he was staring at a ghost.
“You have a son,” Kieran said slowly.
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“Five.”
“And his father?”
I swallowed hard.
“He’s gone.”
Kieran took one step back and gripped the edge of the marble island. His knuckles turned white.
“My brother’s name was Julian,” he said.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
“It’s a common name,” I whispered.
“It is.” His gray eyes lifted to mine, sharp and searching. “Which is why I’m asking you to look me in the face and tell me it’s a coincidence.”
I opened my mouth.
No lie came out.
Because I was exhausted. Because it was 3:07 in the morning. Because I had spent eighteen months scrubbing this man’s floors and watching him from the corners of rooms, wondering how to say the one sentence that could save my son’s life without destroying it.
And because, at that moment, I couldn’t carry it alone anymore.
“I can’t tell you here,” I said. “Not like this.”
“Then tell me where.”
“St. Brendan’s Children’s Hospital. Seventh floor. Pediatric oncology.”
Something flickered across his face. Shock. Then something rawer.
“Get dressed,” he said.
“Mr. Blackwood—”
“Five minutes.” He was already pulling his phone from his pocket. “Meet me in the garage.”
“Are you firing me?”
He looked at me, and for the first time since I had known him, his voice cracked.
“Saraphina. I’m not thinking about your job.”
I changed in four minutes.
We drove south in a black SUV, no driver, no bodyguards, just the hum of the engine and the glow of the dashboard on Kieran’s hard profile. The Hudson River slid past in the dark. He gripped the steering wheel as though it were the only solid thing left in the world.
I knew the story he was living in his head. Everyone in New York knew it.
Six years ago, Julian Blackwood, the youngest brother of the city’s most dangerous man, had died when his car exploded on the Henry Hudson Parkway. The casket at the funeral had been closed because there was almost nothing left. The newspapers called it a gang hit. Kieran’s men had gone to war for it, and fifty men had died before the streets went quiet.
I had read every article.
I had read them in a cramped Brooklyn apartment, three months pregnant, with a shaking hand over my mouth.
“Ten minutes,” Kieran said, without looking at me. “Ten minutes to tell me I’m wrong. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You’re not wrong,” I said quietly.
His jaw flexed.
He did not say another word until we reached the hospital.
The seventh floor was dim and hushed, painted in soft yellows and blues that couldn’t hide the smell of antiseptic. A night nurse named Gloria looked up from her station and smiled tiredly.
“Miss Torres. You’re early. He’s been asking for you.”
Her eyes drifted to Kieran, broad and dark and dangerous in the pale light, and her smile faltered.
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s family.”
I felt Kieran flinch beside me.
Room 714 had a night-light shaped like a crescent moon. In the narrow bed lay a small boy in a knitted blue cap, an IV line taped to the back of his tiny hand. Paper dinosaurs covered the wall above him, drawn in crooked crayon.
On the bedside table stood a framed photograph.
Two young men on a boat, laughing, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders.
Kieran stopped in the doorway like he had hit a wall.
The younger man in the photograph had the same sharp jaw, the same gray-green eyes. The same crooked half-smile.
The little boy in the bed had all three.
“Mama?” Jules murmured, stirring. His eyelids fluttered open. “You came back early.”
“I did, baby.” I crossed the room and touched his cheek. “I brought someone to meet you.”
Jules turned his head.
His eyes landed on the huge man standing frozen in the doorway. They widened slowly, with the sleepy wonder only a child can have.
“You look like Daddy’s picture,” he whispered.
Kieran made a sound I had never heard from him. Something between a breath and a sob.
Then Jules smiled, small and bright and so achingly familiar.
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“Are you Uncle Kieran?”
Read Chapter 3 to discover what Saraphina has been hiding—and why she took a job in the house of the man she feared most.
