"She's four months old," Massimo observes without looking up from his papers. "What kind of opinions can a four-month-old have?"
"Loud ones." Rafael drops into his chair and reaches for the decanter. "Apparently she inherited her mother's stubborn streak."
Kon snorts. "God help us all when she's a teenager. I’ll have to be three steps behind her until the day she gets married. I already have plans on where to put bodies. Anyone fucks with our little angel, gets to meet the angel of death. Good, yeah? I like this plan."
“Get in line.”
That’s Massimo.
"I have ways to make people digitally disappear." Rowan makes the gesture of smoke dissipating. "Poof. Problem solved."
I shake my head. “There is such a thing as helicopter uncles.”
Everyone looks at each other and then in unison all chorus, “Nah.”
After that the banter washes over me like background noise, familiar and comforting in its predictability. These men are my brothers in every way that matters, bound by blood spilled and secrets kept and years of building something that most people would not believe exists. We have made billions together, crushed enemies together, buried bodies together. There is nothing I would not do for any of them.
But tonight my mind keeps drifting to places it has no business going.
Katriana’s face and scent have taken over and I can’t think past the way she felt in my arms. She was so damn soft. She’s the only one I’ve ever wanted to step out of this life for and rebuild something for a woman I could love. Something she could be proud of.
But that isn’t likely to happen. I have spent my entire adult life building walls. Stone by stone, deal by deal, year by year, I constructed a fortress around the hollow place where softer men keep their hearts. It was necessary. The docks taught me early that vulnerability is a knife someone else will use against you, and I learned to keep my weaknesses buried so deep that even I forgot where I put them sometimes.
My mother used to worry about it. She would cup my face in her work-roughened hands and look at me with eyes that saw too much, and she would ask me when I was going to let someone in. When I was going to stop carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and let another person help me hold it.
You're going to be so lonely, Drakey, she said to me once, near the end, when the cancer had whittled her down to bones and stubborn will.You're going to build your empire and sit at the top of it all alone.
She was right. She was always right about the things I did not want to hear.
I have women in my life. I have had plenty over the years, beautiful and willing and drawn to the power I carry like moths to a flame that will burn them if they get too close. But none of them ever made me want to lower the drawbridge.
None of them ever looked at me and saw what lay beneath. The boy working double shifts at fourteen to keep the lights on. Theteenager who learned to fight because the docks did not forgive weakness. The young man who buried his mother with garden dirt still under his fingernails because he couldn't afford help while she was dying.
They saw Drake Moses, the Boss. The man who shuts cities down. The silver fox in the expensive suit with the empire at his fingertips.
None of them ever saw me.
I used to tell myself it did not matter. That companionship was a luxury I did not have time for, that legacy could be built through other means, that the promise I made to my mother could be fulfilled through work and wealth and the family I had chosen rather than the family I might create.
But watching Rafael with Persia has cracked something open in my chest that I cannot seem to close again.
He was like me once. Harder than me, maybe. The fucker was definitely colder in some ways that mattered. The Rafael Milano I grew up knowing would have laughed at the idea of falling in love. That man would have called love weakness. He would have used a woman for exactly as long as she was useful and discarded her without a backward glance.
Now my best friend holds his daughter like she is made of spun glass and looks at his wife like she hung the moon and every star around it. I’ve watched him transform into something softer and fiercer all at once, and I wonder if that kind of change is still possible for a man my age.
Forty-six years old.
Fuck.
My hair went silver before I hit forty because the stress of building this empire aged me from the inside out. I have scars on my knuckles from fights I barely remember and scars on my soul from decisions I will never forget. I have buried friends and enemies alike, sometimes in the same grave, and I have made peace with the particular loneliness of being a man that other men fear.
But I am tired of going home to silence.
I am tired of lying in the dark and reaching for a warmth that is not there. I am tired of watching my brothers find what I have been searching for and pretending that I do not want it too. I am tired of being strong for everyone else while no one thinks to ask if I need someone to be strong for me.
Tonight, something shifts.
It starts as a tightness behind my sternum, a pressure that builds with each breath until I find myself pressing the heel of my hand against my chest like I can massage the feeling away. For one absurd moment, I wonder if this is what a heart attack feels like, if the stress of forty-six years has finally caught up with me and chosen Rafael's boardroom as the place where Drake Moses meets his end.
