Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Marco Falcone
The silence between them stretched, thick and suffocating.
Claire stared at Nico, her mind racing backward two years—to the freezing November night when two of Nico’s silent, stoic guards had walked into their shared penthouse, handed her an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars in cash, and told her she had thirty minutes to leave Manhattan.
She remembered crying on the carpet. She remembered begging Luca to let her speak to Nico just once. She remembered walking down the cold steel emergency stairwell because the elevator was locked down, feeling as though her heart had been carved out of her chest with a dull knife.
All this time, she had believed she was nothing more than a passing distraction for a powerful man who had grown bored of a quiet girl from Brooklyn.
"You... you lied to me," Claire breathed, her eyes filling with hot, angry tears. "You let me believe you hated me."
"If you knew the truth, you would have stayed," Nico said simply. "You were stubborn. You were soft-hearted. You would have insisted on staying by my side, and Marco would have used you to bleed me dry."
"So you decided for me?" she spat softly, her voice trembling. "You decided I wasn't strong enough to make my own choice? You sent me away into the dark, alone, terrified, while I was growing your child inside me!"
"I didn't know about the child, Claire!" Nico snapped, a sudden flash of agonized fury breaking through his cold composure. "If I had known you were pregnant, I would have put you on a private jet to Sicily under a guard of fifty men! I wouldn't have let you sleep in a damp walk-up above a bakery in Queens!"
"Don't you dare talk about my apartment!" Claire warned, standing up from her chair, her body trembling with rage. "I built a life there! I paid my own rent! I baked bread sixteen hours a day to buy Milo’s crib, his clothes, his medicine! I raised a happy, healthy, incredible boy without a single dollar of your bloody syndicate money!"
Nico stood up slowly to his full height, looming over her, but he didn't step forward. His expression softened into something resembling deep, agonized regret.
"I know," Nico said quietly.
Claire blinked, startled by the gentle admission.
"I know about the bakery, Claire," Nico confessed low. "I know about the leaky sink in your kitchen that you fixed yourself with a pipe wrench. I know about the green stroller you bought off Craigslist that had a squeaky left wheel."
Claire’s heart stopped. She took a step back, her eyes widening in horror. "You... you were watching me?"
"Not at first," Nico admitted, looking down at the sleeping child between them. "For the first six months, I stayed away entirely. I was hunting Marco’s remaining lieutenants across Europe. But when I returned to New York sixteen months ago... Luca brought me a report. He told me you hadn't left the state. He told me you were living in Astoria."
Nico reached into his inner suit pocket, pulled out a worn leather wallet, and extracted a folded, glossy photograph. He placed it gently on the small table beside Milo’s bed.
Claire looked down at the photo.
It was taken from across the street on a sunny spring afternoon a year ago. It showed Claire standing outside The Daily Glaze wearing a white baker’s apron covered in flour, holding a tiny, thirteen-month-old Milo in her arms while he laughed hysterically at a red balloon tied to his wrist.
"I sat in my car three blocks away every Tuesday morning at dawn," Nico murmured, his dark eyes locked on the photograph. "I watched you carry him inside. I watched you kiss his head before you unlocked the bakery doors. I thought... I thought you had met someone else. I thought he was another man's son."
"And you never came down?" Claire whispered, her voice cracking. "You never walked across the street?"
"How could I?" Nico asked bitterly. "I had spent a year making sure you were safe from my world. How could I walk back into your clean, bright life and drag my darkness back over you?"
Before Claire could answer, the door swung open again.
Luca walked in carrying a tray containing two thermos flasks of coffee, fresh broth, and warm wool blankets. But his face was tight, his posture rigid, his hand resting casually inside his suit jacket near his armpit holster.
"Don Falcone," Luca said, his voice clipped and urgent. "We have a problem downstairs."
Nico turned instantly, his demeanor snapping back to absolute alertness. "What is it?"
Luca looked nervously at Claire, then back at Nico. "A black SUV just pulled into the ambulance bay. Two men got out. One of them was Salvatore Marco."
May you like
Nico’s eyes narrowed into slits of pure, deadly ice. "Marco's brother? He was supposed to be in Chicago."
"He’s here, boss," Luca reported low. "And he just asked the front desk receptionist which room Milo Sterling was in."
