Chapter 8 - A New Home
Two months passed, and the winter snow began to blanket the grounds of the Romano estate. The mansion, which had once felt like a cold, fortress-like monument to my father’s paranoia, was undergoing a quiet transformation.
I had moved Sarah and Zoe out of the small attic quarters and into a beautiful, sunlit suite on the second floor, right across the hall from my own quarters. The kitchen staff had been given strict instructions that Sarah was no longer a maid; she was the estate’s household manager, tasked with overseeing the property’s logistics rather than performing manual labor.
Zoe had been enrolled in one of the most prestigious private academies in Chicago. Every afternoon, my armored town car would drop her off at the front gates, and she would sprint through the snow, her backpack bouncing, straight into my study.
"Captain's report!" she shouted one afternoon, slamming her backpack onto my antique leather desk.
I closed the ledger I was working on, a small smile playing at the corners of my lips. "Report status, Lookout."
She pulled out a fresh drawing from her folder. It was a picture of a man with a delivery uniform, holding a large box. "The delivery man came today. He didn't have a monster face. He gave me a lollipop. But I checked his box anyway. It just had boring vegetables."
"Excellent work," I said, inspecting the drawing with mock gravity. "No threats detected?"
"None!" she proclaimed, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a slightly crushed chocolate chip cookie she had saved from her school lunch. "I brought you a present. Because your shoes looked a little dusty today."
I looked down at the pair of Oxfords I was wearing—the same pair she had 'ruined' two months ago. I had refused to let the staff polish them or throw them away. They were my good luck charm now. I took the cookie from her hand, breaking it in half to share with her.
"How is school, Zoe?" I asked.
"Boring," she sighed, chewing on her half of the cookie. "The other kids don't know how to do circles with the shoe cream. They just want to play with blocks. I told them I work for the biggest boss in the city, but they didn't believe me."
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"They don't need to believe you," I said gently, wiping a crumb of chocolate from her nose. "As long as you know it's true."
Later that evening, Sarah joined us in the study for dinner. We sat by the roaring fireplace, eating a meal that felt less like a mafia formal dinner and more like a real family gathering. Watching Zoe laugh as she tried to feed her teddy bear a piece of broccoli, I realized that the war in New York hadn't been the most important battle of my year. The real victory had happened in a dark shoe-shine room, won by a little girl with a crayon.
