Chapter 3 - THE CHILD'S DRAWING
The silver pocket watch felt like a block of ice in Damian’s palm.
He stared at the photograph of the boy. Four years old, maybe. He had Damian’s jawline, his brow, and his unmistakable gray eyes. The math hit Damian with the force of a freight train. Five years of marriage. A woman who claimed she was spending her days volunteering at local charities and visiting her mother's grave.
She hadn't been visiting a grave. She had been raising his son.
“Tommy,” Damian barked into his phone as he strode out of the closet. “Get every man we have on the streets. I don’t care about the Feds. I don’t care about the money. Find my wife.”
“Boss, the Feds just froze the secondary accounts. Half our captains are threatening to walk. If we don’t pay them by morning—”
“If they walk, kill them,” Damian roared. “Find her!”
In the safehouse, Lena sat at the kitchen island, a thick leather ledger open in front of her. Leo was fast asleep on the couch, wrapped in her ivory shawl. Marco stood by the window, watching the street.
“He’ll find the watch,” Marco said quietly. “You left it on purpose.”
“He needs to know he lost more than his pride,” Lena replied, turning a page. Her voice held no warmth. “Damian operates on control. Taking his money wounds him. Showing him he has a son he can never touch will break him.”
“It will also make him reckless,” Marco warned. “The Navarros survived by being ghosts. If the rival cartels realize Elena Navarro is alive, they won’t just send the Feds. They’ll send hit squads. And they won’t spare the boy.”
Lena traced a finger over a column of numbers. “That’s why Damian has to fall tonight. Completely.”
Across town, Damian kicked open the back door of Sullivan’s Grill, the diner where he had first met Lena. The old manager, a sweaty man named Sal, scrambled backward against the deep fryer.
“I swear to God, Mr. Russo, I haven’t seen her in five years!” Sal begged.
Damian grabbed Sal by the collar, lifting him onto his toes. “She didn’t just vanish, Sal. She used this place as a front. What did she leave behind?”
“Nothing! Just... just some junk in her old locker! We never emptied it because she paid the rent on it in cash for ten years!”
Damian dragged Sal to the employee breakroom and ripped the padlock off locker number four. Inside was a stack of burner phones, a passport from Mexico with a different name, and a child’s crayon drawing.
Damian snatched the drawing. It was a crude sketch of three people. A woman, a little boy, and a tall man.
But the tall man didn't look like Damian. The man in the drawing had a jagged, angry red scar running down the left side of his face.
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Damian’s breath hitched. He knew that scar. It belonged to Hector Vargas, the enforcer who had butchered the Navarro family ten years ago. The man Damian had secretly funded to wipe out his Mexican rivals.
Lena hadn't just married him to hide. She had married the man who funded her family’s murder.
