14. Dorian
DORIAN
Something is wrong.
I know it before I know it. Before the minutes add up, and the logic kicks in. I know it in my body first, then in my brain, the animal part of me lifting its head and saying move. It’s the way I’ve recognized every threat in my life.
Five minutes. It takes me an entire five minutes to stop lying to myself, sitting in a booth and telling myself it’s fine, Lillie is being overly careful washing her hands, or Quinn is fixing her braid. Something normal, everyday.
Five minutes pass, and then I’m on my feet. Opening the door to the ladies’ room without knocking first.
The room is empty. Both stalls are open. Water drips from one of the sinks, and on the tile floor are Lillie’s butterfly shoes. One on its side, the other upside down.
It takes a moment for reality to catch up to the horror that’s frozen my brain. My daughter’s shoes are on the floor of a restaurant bathroom, and my daughter is not in them.
The sound that comes out of me isn’t a word. It’s something older than language, from the base of my spine. My daughter is gone.
And I’m moving through a second door in the room, because it has to be the way they left.
They didn’t walk past me, so this is the only other option.
I move through the service corridor, past boxes, to a fire exit propped open with a brick.
The alley is empty, but there are tire marks on the concrete and a zip tie in the gutter.
My hands are shaking in a way they haven’t since I was seventeen years old, standing over my father’s body.
Marco’s cousin finds me in the alley. He’s already on his phone. “White van. No plates. Headed east, maybe two minutes ago. I didn’t see it leave—I was watching the front; they went out the—”
I take him by the collar with both hands and push him against the wall. Whatever he sees in my face stops his voice like I flipped a switch. I hold him there for three seconds but don’t say anything, because if I open my mouth right now, I will destroy something. It can’t be him. I still need him.
I let go, and he slides down the wall half an inch. “Find Tristan,” I bark. “Now.”
Tristan is already in the car when I come around the front of the building. He has two phones and a tablet, and the tablet shows a map. On the map, there is a blue dot, currently moving east on the highway.
The locket. Lillie’s locket. I first put it around her neck the day after Sofia died and have put it on her ever since.
It’s gold, small, on a chain fine enough that a child could wear it without noticing.
Inside there’s a photograph of her mother on one side and a GPS chip the size of a grain of rice on the other.
I have checked it every morning for two years, clasping it around her neck and adjusting the chain and making sure the signal is live before I let her walk out of my sight.
I’ve done this every single day without exception, including today. Especially today, leaving the house with her. It was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.
“She’s moving east,” Tristan says. “Highway Nine, past the interchange. The speed is consistent. They’re not running. They don’t know.”
“How many men do we have?”
“Twelve on the way, six already rolling,” he reports. “Two of mine from the restaurant are a quarter mile behind the van.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It’s enough.” He looks at me. His face is flat and still. “Dorian. It’s enough. Breathe.”
I don’t breathe. Breathing is a thing that happens to people who aren’t watching a blue dot on a screen representing their daughter’s physical presence. But I stop talking, which Tristan takes as compliance. Sal puts the car in gear and pulls out, and we follow the dot.
“They’ll go to the warehouse,” I predict, staring at the screen. “The one on Mercer. The Castellano property.”
“The signal is trending that way.”
“That’s where they’ll take them.” I know it the way I know everything about these people, because I’ve been studying the shape of their operation for weeks.
Learning the way they move and the properties they use, the patterns they fall into.
The warehouse on Mercer has two entrances, a loading bay, and a second-floor office with windows overlooking the floor.
It’s defensible, but not against what I’m bringing.
“Tell the men: two teams. First team takes the loading bay, second comes in through the east side. Nobody fires until I’m inside. Nobody fires near my daughter.”
“And Quinn?”
“Nobody fires near either of them.” I barely recognize the sound of my own voice. “If anyone puts a bullet within ten feet of them, I’ll kill him myself. Make sure they understand that. Make sure they know it’s not a figure of speech.”
Tristan relays it while I watch the dot slow down, turn, then stop.
Mercer Street. I was right.
We park a block away. The street is dark—industrial, empty.
The kind of block where nobody looks out windows because there are no windows to look out of.
The warehouse sits at the end, lit from inside by a yellowish glow that leaks through the loading bay doors.
There are two cars parked out front. A man by the entrance stands with a cigarette glowing in the dark and a phone that also glows.
He might as well stand under a neon sign.
Fourteen men now. They arrive in ones and twos. Quiet, professional, parking in different spots, materializing the way Tristan’s people materialize—out of nothing, like the dark knitted them. They’re armed. I’m armed. The weight of the gun against my ribs is the only thing holding me together.
They’re all I have. The two of them. They’re my life.
Tristan puts a hand on my arm, which I didn’t realize until now was shaking slightly. “Let the first team clear the bay. Thirty seconds. Then we go in.”
“I’m going in first.”
“You’re going in with me.” His hand doesn’t move. Neither do his eyes. “Not first. With me. You go in there alone and angry, and you’re dead. Then your daughter has no father, and your girl has no one. You go with me, Dorian.”
I hate him for being right. I hate that he’s always right, and I hate that he’s the only person in my life who talks to me like this. I hate that I need it. “With you,” I growl.
The first team moves. I watch as they cross the street—silent, low, four men who know what they’re doing because I trained them to do it. They reach the loading bay, and there’s a sound like a held breath being released. Then they’re inside, and there’s shouting.
Then there isn’t.
Tristan nods. We go.
The warehouse floor is concrete, open, stacked with crates along the walls.
Two of the Castellano men are already down—not dead, but restrained, with their faces against the concrete.
Three more are backed against the far wall with their hands up and guns on them.
My men move through the space with the controlled efficiency of people who’ve done this before—clearing corners, checking behind crates, calling clear.
I’m not looking at any of them.
I’m looking at the office on the second floor, where the light is, where the door is closed. Where my daughter has to be.
I take the stairs two at a time with Tristan beside me. We reach the door. I don’t knock. I put my shoulder into it, and the lock gives, and inside—
Quinn is on the floor against the far wall with Lillie in her lap, her wrists zip-tied in front of her. Her face is pale, and her eyes are huge. When she sees me, something collapses in her expression. Relief and fury, and terror, all at once, hitting her face like a storm.
Lillie looks up. “Daddy!”
Between me and them, standing in the middle of the room with a gun raised, is a man I don’t know. Castellano crew—young, dark-haired, sweating. He aims the gun at my chest with the unsteady grip of someone who didn’t expect this to go sideways.
“Stop,” he says. “Stop right there, Moretti, or I—”
“Daddy, that man is mean!” Lillie announces from the floor, in the same tone she uses to report that Poptart ate her snack. “He wouldn’t answer any of my questions.”
“Shh,” Quinn whispers, holding her closer. “That’s enough.”
I glance their way and lift my hand slightly, signaling for silence, that everything is under control now. “We’re going to settle this like men,” I murmur, training my gaze on the kid with the gun. “The girls don’t need to be involved. Do they?”
His tongue darts over his lips. A nervous gesture. Sweat rolls from his temple down a cheek that looks so smooth, I wonder if he’s old enough to shave. “You’re not calling the shots here, Moretti,” he reminds me in a voice so deep, I know it’s put-on. “Keep your mouth shut.”
“Don’t talk to my daddy like that,” Lillie warns fiercely.
The man’s eyes flick to her. Just for a second, the involuntary glance of a person who cannot believe this child is still speaking.
Lillie, my daughter, my five-year-old, who is sitting on the floor in strawberry socks with no shoes, draws her leg back and kicks him in the shin with every ounce of force her small body contains.
He stumbles. The gun dips.
That is all I need.
I cross the distance in two steps, and my hand closes around his wrist. I twist, and the gun comes free while my other hand finds his throat.
I push him against the wall so hard the plaster cracks behind his head.
He makes a sound. I don’t care what the sound is.
I’m looking at his face, and I’m seeing every minute my daughter spent in this room, every second Quinn sat on that floor with her hands tied.
The thing inside me that I set down at the front door of my house every night is fully, completely awake, and it wants only one thing.
There is only one outcome that makes any sense.
“Dorian.” Tristan’s voice behind me. Like my conscience in human form. It’s quiet but firm. “Not in front of the girls.”
I hold him against the wall for three more seconds before dropping him.
Tristan’s men take him while I turn around.
My daughter is running toward me with her arms out, and I catch her the way Quinn always catches her.
She buries her face in my neck. “I knew you would come,” she whispers. “I told Quinn you would.”
Quinn is still on the floor. She’s looking at me with eyes I can’t read—there are too many things happening behind them all at once. Tristan crouches beside her and cuts the zip ties with a knife. She rubs her wrists, but otherwise she doesn’t move.
I carry Lillie to her and kneel down. For a long moment, the three of us are on the floor of a warehouse office, and no one says anything.
I can’t leave with them, not yet. It would mean letting go long enough to move out of here, and there’s no hope of that for at least a few minutes while I hold them and breathe.
The car ride home is quiet. Lillie is out. Deep, total, the sleep of a kid who has been through something enormous and processed it by talking nonstop for forty-five minutes before shutting down completely. She’s curled in Quinn’s lap in the back seat, her strawberry socks tucked underneath her.
Quinn hasn’t spoken since we left the warehouse.
Her face is unreadable. I wait until Lillie is in her bed—the blanket tucked, the locket still around her neck, its small gold weight rising and falling with her breathing.
Do I give her a few extra kisses before closing the door? What man in his right mind wouldn’t?
Quinn is waiting for me in the hallway, leaning against the wall outside Lillie’s door with her arms folded and her shoulders up around her ears.
It’s only once I join her out there that I face her head-on. “Ask me,” I murmur.
“I don’t need to ask you.” Her voice is flat.
Tired. “The man in the van told us everything. You’re the head of a crime family.
You run docks and warehouses or something or other.
” She lifts her shoulders a little higher before letting them drop.
“You’re not in finance or any kind of regular, everyday business, are you? ”
“No.”
“And all this time… the wall and the guards and all of it…”
“Yes.”
She closes her eyes. I wait for the part where she tells me she’s leaving.
I expect her to push off the wall and walk down the hall, to pack the things she brought and drive away in her terrible car.
I’m ready for it because I deserve it. I lied to her every single day, and my lies almost got her killed.
They almost got my daughter killed. There is no version of this where I come out clean.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. It’s not enough.
It will never be enough. “I should’ve told you from the beginning, before any of this happened.
I should’ve let you decide whether to stay once you knew what I am.
I took that choice away from you, and I put you in danger because of it.
If you want to leave, I’ll let you go, and I’ll spend every day of my life knowing I was the reason. ”
Her eyes open slowly.
“I’m not finished,” I tell her. If she’s going to leave, she should know everything.
“I love you. I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you for a long time, and I want you to be my wife.
And I know—I know it’s insane. I know I just told you I run a criminal organization. I know this isn’t the life you—”
“Yes.”
I stop.
“Yes,” she says again. Her eyes are wet, but her voice is the steadiest it’s been all night.
“I’m in love with you too, you idiot. I’ve been in love with you since…
I don’t even know when. I don’t care what you do.
I care about you, and I care about Lillie, and if this is the life, then this is the life. I’m staying in it.”
I’ve stared down prosecutors and rival bosses. Men with weapons. I have never once in my life been as unprepared as I am now, standing in a hallway outside my daughter’s bedroom.
“You’re sure?” Because I need to hear it again.
“I’m sure.” She pushes off the wall and takes my face in both hands. “Now stop talking and take me to bed, Mr. Moretti.”
I take her to bed because I am not a man who looks a gift horse in the mouth.
For the first time in my life, the door I walk through at the end of the night isn’t the one that separates me from the work.
It’s the one that leads me to her, and to my daughter sleeping down the hall, and to a life I don’t deserve but am going to protect with everything I have. With every single thing I am.
She falls asleep against my chest, but I stay awake, holding her. I listen to the house creak around us, and I wonder exactly what I did to deserve everything I’ve ever wanted and never knew I needed.
Maybe I’ll never find out.
I only know I’m never letting go.