One of the teachers turns, clearly startled. “Are you Noah’s mother?”
“Yes. Where is he?”
The woman hesitates just long enough for my stomach to drop.
“A man picked him up,” she says. “He said he was family. There was a new girl at the front desk, and she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to—” The woman chokes down a sob. “I’m sosorry, Izzy. Noah looked so happy—he said it had to be his dad—so the new girl didn’t think?—”
Izzy goes completely still.
For a moment, I don’t hear anything else. Not the voices around us, not the traffic, not Izzy’s sharp intake of breath.
There is only one thought left in my head.
Someone has taken my son.
19
IZZY
The world doesn’t make sense anymore.
Voices blur together around me. Teachers. Parents. A policeman asking questions.
But all I hear is the same sentence repeating over and over in my head.
A man picked him up.
A man picked up son. A stranger picked him up, and now he’s nowhere to be found.
The ground feels unstable under my feet, like the whole world tilted and no one bothered to tell my body how to stand on it anymore.
Beside me, Nico hasn’t moved.
He stands very still, but the stillness isn’t calm. It’s something sharper than that.
Danger, I think.
“Tell me what he looked like,” he demands from the girl at the front desk, Anya, a young redhead seconds away from bursting into guilty tears. His voice is low. Controlled.
I envy him for that. It’s taking everything I have not to break down right now, but Nico’s mafia mask has slipped back onseamlessly, like he’s used to this. Shifting back into Don Neri in times of crisis.
The kind of Don who takes no prisoners.
Anya swallows. “Tall. Dark coat. I thought— I thought he was family. He knew the boy’s name. I’m so, so sorr?—”
“Accent?” Nico cuts her off.
“I… I think he was Russian or thereabouts. I’m not sure.”
Nico pulls out his phone without another word.
“Leone,” he says when the call connects. “Pull every man we have. Now. Schools, streets, cameras. I want every set of eyes we own looking for Noah.”
He ends the call and starts speaking to someone else immediately. I get why he has to—he’s thinking of Noah—but something inside me yearns for the man I woke up with today. The one who held me close and promised me we’d be a family forever.
I need that man now. Need him to tell me everything’s going to be okay, that we’ll find Noah. That we’ll be a family again.
That it’s not my fault he was taken.
