Chapter 1
The music stopped the exact second the heavy oak door clicked shut.
Dominic Russo didn't drop his keys. He didn't shout. He stood in the threshold of his own kitchen like a man turned to salt, his broad shoulders stiff beneath a charcoal overcoat that smelled of winter air and high-grade gunpowder. For three seconds, the only sound in the room was the low hum of the refrigerator and the frantic beating of my own heart.
The youngest triplet, still perched securely on my shoulders, let out a tiny, inquisitive chirp and reached out to tug a stray lock of Dominic’s dark hair as he walked past—an action so casual, so completely devoid of fear, that it felt like an act of war.
Dominic froze. Slowly, agonizingly, he raised his head. His eyes, the color of wet slate and just as cold, locked onto mine. Then they shifted upward, tracking the small hands clutching my hair, before dropping to the kitchen table where his other two daughters were giggling over a box of spilled crayons.
"Where," Dominic began, his voice dropping into that dark, gravelly register that made his toughest capos sweat, "did you learn that song?"
The question wasn't loud, but it carried the crushing weight of a collapsing mountain. My throat went bone dry. I remembered Rosa’s warning on my first day: The boss doesn't like ghosts, girl. And he keeps his dead ghosts locked in the basement. That song—the soft, lilting lullaby about a silver moon over the Mediterranean—hadn't come from a radio or a record player. It was the song Elena Russo used to hum to her babies before an assassin’s bullet tore through the passenger window of a black town car on a rainy Tuesday afternoon fourteen months ago.
"My mother used to sing it," I managed to whisper, keeping my hands steady as I gently lowered the youngest girl back down to the tile floor. "In another life. Before everything fell apart."
Dominic didn't blink. He took one slow, deliberate step forward, closing the distance between us until I could feel the residual chill radiating from his coat. He looked down at me—really looked at me—not as a nameless cleaner hired through a vetted agency, but as an intruder who had somehow bypassed every security protocol he owned and unlocked the one vault he had welded shut with grief and rage.
"Nobody sings that song in this house," Dominic said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. "Nobody has spoken that melody since the day they lowered her into the ground. And yet my daughters—who haven't uttered a syllable since the world went dark—are not only listening to you, they are answering."
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"I didn't force them," I said, lifting my chin despite the primal instinct screaming at me to look away. "I didn't ask them to speak. I just didn't stop breathing when the house got quiet."
A muscle twitched along Dominic's jawline. For a fraction of a second, something fractured behind his slate-grey eyes—a glimpse of raw, agonizing exhaustion that he hid behind billions of dollars and an empire built on fear. But before I could parse it, his mask slammed back down. He turned his gaze to his daughters, who were now quietly tugging at the hem of his trousers, waiting to see what the monster of New York would do to the stranger in the apron.
