Page 6 of The Hidden Heir

Something in my chest shifts, quiet and catastrophic, like the first crack in a foundation. I know violence. I know leverage, silence, the mathematics of fear. I have no protocol for a two-year-old drinking water with both hands.

Then Michael sets down the cup, considers me for a long moment, and holds out the mangled half of his cracker.

I stare at it. Valentina has gone very still at the counter.

I take the cracker.

A dead woman's son just fed me. Somewhere in the back of my skull, the schedule slips an hour.

"How did you find us?" she asks, low, her eyes on her son.

"Four accounts under three names, all of it bleeding into the same six blocks of Calumet City." I watch it land, watch her run the audit behind her eyes and find the hole. "You were good, Valentina. Two years without a footprint. But good only has to fail once."

"Then he can find us too." Her voice thins. "If you traced it, my stepfather can."

"That depends on what you tell me in the next five minutes." I move along the counter, unhurried. "You've heard about Stefano."

"I have."

Something crosses her face. Grief, and underneath it a flicker of something harder. I can't read it, and I don't like what I can't read.

"Grief, or guilt," I say. "From where I'm standing, they photograph the same."

Color floods her cheeks. "You have no idea what you're talking about."

"Then educate me. The tip that killed my brother came from a burner bought in this neighborhood, the same afternoon your money moved. You disappear with his son. You stay hidden for two years with a professional's discipline. Mancuso discipline. And my brother dies with your stepfather's fingerprints all over the rumor." I stop across the island from her. "Tell me what I'm supposed to think."

"That I've been hiding from Mauro. Not working for him." She keeps her voice down for the boy's sake, I realize, not mine, but it shakes with fury anyway. She turns toward the counter, reaching past the cereal boxes, and her hand drifts, almost casually, toward the knife block behind the toaster.

I catch her wrist before her fingers close around a handle. Not hard. Just final.

"Good," I murmur, close enough now to smell chamomile and baby soap. "Fight me. Just don't make Michael watch you lose."

She wrenches free and puts the island between us again, breathing fast. "Get out of my house."

I should want her compliant. Compliant is efficient. Compliant keeps the schedule.

I want her exactly like this. The schedule slips again.

"Cindy," I say instead.

That stops her.

"Your stepfather's young wife. She ran off a year ago. No family in the Camorra will offer him another, and his doctors can't fix what age already broke. There is no heir coming from Mauro Mancuso." I nod toward the high chair, where Michael is dismantling his cracker with the focus of a jeweler. "Which leaves one candidate. Mauro doesn't need Michael to share his blood, Valentina. He needs a boy he can name, shape, and seat at the head of his table. Your son is the only future that man has left."

The blood leaves her face. "All he needs to do is get close enough to grab us," she whispers.

"Yes. And tonight you learned exactly how findable you are."

"Then we run." She's already moving, already planning. I can see it assembling behind her eyes. "I'll pack a bag. We'll be gone before sunrise. I have money put away, we can..."

"You don't have any money."

"What?"

"I froze your accounts this morning. All four."

Her jaw drops, and for a moment she just stares at me, doing the arithmetic of everything she no longer has. "You had no right..."