Chapter 2 - The Sound of the Doorbell
The rain in Queens didn't fall so much as it drifted, a heavy, gray mist that coated the windshields and blurred the neon signs of the laundromats and corner bodegas.
Inside a small, second-floor apartment on 34th Avenue, Sarah Donovan was sweeping the kitchen linoleum for the third time that evening. The apartment smelled of cinnamon tea and damp wool. On the small wooden kitchen table sat a stack of watercolor paintings, the paper still slightly buckled from heavy washes of blue and black.
Sarah picked up the top drawing.
It was a family portrait, executed with the terrifyingly earnest simplicity of a four-year-old. On the left stood a stick-figure woman with yellow yarn hair and a green dress—Sarah. In the center, holding a balloon, was a smaller figure with enormous brown eyes and a gap-toothed smile—Lily. And on the right stood a tall, broad-shouldered figure wearing a black coat.
Every other person in the drawing had eyes, a nose, a mouth.
The tall figure’s face was an oval of empty, stark-white construction paper. No features. No expression. Just a blank, ghostly void where a father should have been.
Sarah set the paper down and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The ache behind her temples had been a permanent resident for three years—ever since the night Adrian Moretti had vanished from her life without a goodbye, leaving behind only a stack of cash in a brown envelope and a promise that staying away from him was the only way she and their unborn child would ever survive.
She had kept that promise. She had moved across the boroughs, changed her last name back to her maiden name, worked three jobs, and never once called the emergency number Vincent Russo had left her in a slip of paper tucked inside a baby book.
A sharp, single knock sounded at the front door.
Sarah froze.
In her neighborhood, people didn't knock like that. They banged, they shouted, or they didn't knock at all. That single, measured rap—solid, deliberate, unmistakable—belonged to a man who didn't fear the room he was walking into.
Her heart hammered against her ribs as she walked down the narrow hallway, her hand trembling as she reached for the deadbolt. She didn't look through the peephole. She already knew who was standing on the other side.
She turned the lock and pulled the door open.
Adrian Moretti stood under the dim yellow glow of the hallway light. He was wearing a dark trench coat over a heavy suit, his left arm held slightly rigid beneath the wool, hiding the bandaged shoulder where Dimitri Volkov’s bullet had torn through him four days ago. His face was paler than she remembered, lines of exhaustion carved deep around his dark eyes, but the raw, commanding presence of him filled the small stairwell like an electric charge.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The hum of the hallway refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic below were the only things filling the space between them.
“Sarah,” he said. His voice was lower than she remembered, rougher around the edges, as if he hadn't used it for anything other than issuing orders in months.
Sarah’s fingers tightened around the edge of the door. Anger—cold, sharp, and incandescent—flared up to burn away the shock.
“You have a lot of nerve coming here, Adrian,” she whispered fiercely, stepping back so he couldn't push his way in, though they both knew he didn't need to force anything. “After three years? After a note on a kitchen counter and a bag of money? You think you can just show up because you feel like it?”
“I didn't come because I felt like it,” Adrian said, stepping across the threshold, closing the door softly behind him. The scent of rain, cold asphalt, and expensive cedar filled her hallway. “I came because I almost died on Tuesday night. And while I was lying on a table in Mount Sinai staring at the ceiling, I realized something.”
Sarah crossed her arms, her chest heaving. “What? That you’re immortal? That your enemies finally caught up to your little game?”
“No,” Adrian said, his gaze dropping past her toward the kitchen, where the watercolor paintings lay on the table. “I realized that I spent three years hiding from the wrong thing. I was so busy protecting her from my enemies that I forgot I was the one who was going to break her heart.”
Sarah stopped. She looked at his face—really looked at it—and saw the dark shadows under his eyes, the tight, unnatural way he held his left arm, and the quiet, terrible desperation in his gaze.
“She drew you today,” Sarah said, her voice dropping to a raw whisper. “Again. A man with no face. She asked me this morning why the other girls’ daddies pick them up from daycare and ours lives in the sky like an airplane.”
Adrian flinched as if he’d been struck. The bullet wound in his shoulder twitched, and he closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, fighting a wave of pain—or maybe something much worse.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“She’s sleeping in her room,” Sarah said, her voice trembling. She pointed a finger at his chest. “You can look at her, Adrian. You can look at what your absence did to her. But then you’re going to walk back out that door, because I have spent three years building a safe life for my daughter, and I will not let a war zone follow her through our front door.”
Adrian didn't argue. He didn't issue an order or offer a cold, calculated strategy. He simply looked at Sarah with an expression she had never seen on the ruthless fixer of the New York underworld.
May you like
It was the look of a man who was already kneeling.
“Show me,” he said quietly.
