Chapter 1 - The Smallest Bodyguard
My three-year-old daughter was trying to save a dying mafia boss with a cartoon bandage while armed men searched outside to finish killing him.
“Shh,” Emma whispered, pressing the smiling bear above his eyebrow. “I’ll protect you.”
Lorenzo Duca lay against the gardening shed wall, his white shirt soaked with blood.
My daughter’s stuffed rabbit sat beside his hand.
For one terrible second, I couldn’t move.
Then boots crunched over wet gravel.
“Check the garden! Marco said he came this way.”
“Emma,” I whispered. “Come here.”
“He’s hurt, Mama.”
“I can see that.”
“He needs the big bandages.”
Her plastic first-aid kit lay open between them. I had bought it at a dollar store because she liked pretending she could fix everything.
Lorenzo’s eyes snapped open.
His hand slipped beneath his jacket.
I caught his wrist.
“No gun. Not near my daughter.”
Even half-dead, he looked like a man people obeyed.
I wasn’t one of those people.
Before my husband died, I’d nearly finished nursing school. I knew what cold skin and a racing pulse meant.
Lorenzo was running out of time.
Emma touched his neck.
“Mama, his heart is running.”
“I know, baby.”
“Can you catch it?”
A flashlight beam swept across the wall.
I pulled a folded gardening apron from a hook and pressed it against his wound. He grunted.
“Keep your hand there.”
“You need to leave,” he whispered.
“With them outside?”
He didn’t answer.
Months earlier, while hunting for a button Emma had dropped, I’d found an iron ring beneath the potting bench.
I dragged the bench aside.
The trapdoor opened onto narrow stone steps.
Lorenzo stared.
“My father’s storm room.”
“You knew about it?”
“I knew it existed.”
The shed door rattled.
I pulled his arm over my shoulder. Emma took three of his fingers.
“I’m helping.”
We went down one painful step at a time.
The trapdoor closed just before men entered above us.
“There’s blood here.”
Emma buried her face against my leg.
Lorenzo found a switch.
Dim lights revealed monitors, ledgers, photographs, and a recorder flashing red.
This wasn’t a shelter.
It was a surveillance vault.
Lorenzo pressed PLAY.
A woman’s voice filled the room.
“Once Lorenzo is dead, the family becomes mine.”
His face emptied.
I knew that voice.
His sister, Vittoria, had spent the evening choosing flowers upstairs.
May you like
White lilies.
For a funeral she already knew was coming.
