The first thing Vincent Moretti noticed was the blood.

Not the cinematic kind you saw in movies, bright and dramatic and clean enough to be art. This was smeared, half-dried, the sort of stain that looked like panic had fingers. It marked the tiny hands clutching his suit sleeve, and it didn’t belong on a six-year-old.

It didn’t belong in La Corona, either.

La Corona was where Philadelphia’s polished men came to feel immortal. It sat tucked behind a line of manicured trees on Walnut Street, discreet as a confession. Inside, the lights were warm, the air perfumed with truffle oil and expensive bourbon. The kind of place where laughter never got too loud and nobody asked questions they couldn’t afford to hear answered.

And it was Vincent Moretti’s place.

Not in the legal sense, though the paperwork would have said it was owned by a holding company and managed by an invisible board. But everyone knew who the room belonged to, the same way sailors know who owns the sea.

Vincent sat in his usual corner of the VIP lounge, back to the wall, a vantage point that offered him every doorway and every face. His men were arranged with practiced casualness: Marco at his left shoulder, broad as a safe; Niko near the door, eyes on everything; Bruno seated close enough to reach a weapon without reaching for one. Conversations around them stayed low. Glass clinks were careful. Even the pianist seemed to play softer when Vincent was in the building.

Vincent had spent ten years training the city to breathe around him.

He was thirty-six, cut from angles and restraint. Steel-gray eyes, a scar along his cheek that made his face look permanently unfinished. He wore a suit the color of storm clouds, and his demeanor matched. His voice rarely rose, because it didn’t have to. Men didn’t follow him because he inspired them. They followed him because the alternative was a life with no shelter.

That was the story people told, anyway.

The truth was quieter: Vincent didn’t allow himself to want anything anymore. Wanting was a doorway. And doorways were how the worst things entered.

Tonight was a Tuesday, and Tuesday nights were for business. Territory lines. Numbers. Lists of problems that could be solved with money or intimidation or time. Emotion was not invited to the table.

Then the oak doors at the front of La Corona slammed open hard enough to rattle the chandelier.

Conversation died like a candle in wind.

A manager started forward, face whitening, but he didn’t get two steps before a small body stumbled inside, trembling as if the world had suddenly turned too cold to hold.

She was no more than six. Nightgown torn, printed with tiny pink flowers. Bare feet raw and red. Brown hair tangled into knots, stuck to her cheeks with tears. The blood on her hands looked wrong against the softness of her skin, like someone had smeared a bruise across an angel.

For one suspended moment, the room didn’t understand what it was seeing.

Then it did, and the reaction came in a dozen versions of the same instinct: not my problem.

Some patrons looked away immediately, as if eye contact might turn obligation into reality. A man at the bar clicked his tongue, annoyed the way people get annoyed by sirens they don’t need. Someone whispered, “Where’s her mother?” as if mothers were always nearby when children were in trouble, as if life came with a safety net that always appeared on time.

The girl’s eyes swept the room with the desperate speed of someone searching for a rope while drowning. She wasn’t looking for sympathy. She wasn’t looking for spare change. She was looking for power.

Her gaze locked onto Vincent’s table, and something in her expression changed, sharpened, like instinct had chosen a direction.

The bodyguards stiffened. Niko’s hand moved toward his jacket.

No one approached Vincent Moretti uninvited.

The girl did it anyway.

She ran straight to him, weaving between tables, leaving faint wet prints on the marble floor. She reached his chair and grabbed his sleeve with both hands as if she’d caught the edge of the world.

The blood from her palms smeared into the fabric.

Marco’s chair scraped back. Bruno rose halfway.

Vincent lifted a finger, and his men froze. Not because the gesture was dramatic, but because it was command in its purest form.

The girl’s lower lip trembled. Her words came out broken by sobs.

“They’re beating my sister,” she choked. “Please. She’s… she’s dying. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know who would stop him. Please!”

Every eye in the VIP lounge moved to Vincent.

There were people in that room who would have watched a grown man get stabbed and returned to their wine. But a child begging with blood on her hands did something different. It scraped the varnish off civility and exposed what was underneath.

Vincent looked down at the tiny fingers gripping him like a lifeline.

He should have peeled her off with two cold words and handed her to the manager. He should have protected his boundaries, his reputation, his vow.

Instead, something old and unwanted stirred behind his ribs.

Her eyes were brown. The exact shade of autumn leaves after rain.

For a blink, the present blurred, and Vincent was twenty-six again, standing in a kitchen that smelled like garlic and simmering tomatoes.

His mother, Elena, humming as she stirred sauce with a wooden spoon. His sister, Sofia, sixteen and impossible, perched on the counter with a biology textbook open, arguing about whether he could ever be “normal.”

“You could,” Sofia had insisted, poking his shoulder. “You just like being scary. It’s your hobby.”

“I don’t like being scary,” Vincent had lied, and Elena had laughed softly like she knew him better than he knew himself.

Back then, he’d had two anchors in a life full of storms.

Then the storms came for them.

A rival crew, the Serranos, didn’t attack Vincent’s father directly. They attacked what would hurt most. Elena and Sofia were taken outside Sofia’s school on a bright afternoon when life still believed it was safe.

Vincent had begged. He’d offered money, territory, anything. His father had refused. Pride. Principles. The kind of hard-headed honor that put reputation above flesh and blood.

Two days later, police found what was left.

Elena had been killed quickly, the coroner said, as if that word could be a kindness. Sofia… Sofia had fought. Sofia had tried to shield her mother with her own body, like a teenager could block bullets with love.

When Vincent identified her, her fingers were still wrapped around the tiny angel-wing necklace he’d given her for her birthday.

“Because you’re my angel,” he’d told her.

And then his angel was gone.

He became something else after that.

He dismantled the Serranos with methodical cruelty, turning grief into a blade. When it was over, he stood at the top of a kingdom built of fear and emptiness and swore, at Sofia’s grave, that he would never love again.

Love was weakness.

Weakness was death.

That vow had held for ten years.

Until a six-year-old girl with Sofia’s eyes clutched him and begged.

Vincent blinked, and the kitchen vanished. La Corona returned. The room was still silent, as if it had been waiting for his decision like a verdict.

He lowered himself to one knee, bringing his face level with the child’s.

His voice, when it came, wasn’t the voice his men heard in meetings. It was quieter. Human.

“What’s your name?”

She swallowed hard. “Rosie.”

“Rosie,” Vincent repeated, storing it away. “Where’s your sister?”

Rosie hiccuped and rattled off an address between sobs. A decaying building in Graymont, a neighborhood the city pretended it didn’t have. Vincent knew it well. It sat in contested territory, ruled by a gang that called themselves the Northside Serpents, men who preyed on desperation like it was a resource.

Vincent turned his head slightly. “Marco.”

Marco stared as if he’d never seen his boss kneel before anything. “Yeah, boss?”

“Get the cars. All of them. Now.”

Marco hesitated for exactly one heartbeat.

Vincent’s eyes flicked to him, cold enough to frost glass.

Marco snapped into motion. “Now. Move,” he barked into his phone as he walked.

Vincent looked back at Rosie. She was shaking so hard her teeth chattered, and Vincent couldn’t tell if it was cold or fear or both.

Without thinking, he shrugged off his suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders. It swallowed her like a blanket, the expensive fabric absurd against her torn nightgown.

Rosie blinked up at him, startled by warmth.

“Do you promise?” she whispered.

Promises were landmines. Vincent had spent ten years stepping around them.

But her eyes held him, and he found himself answering anyway.

“I promise,” he said.

Something in Rosie’s posture loosened, like she’d been holding herself upright by sheer will and his words finally gave her permission to sag.

Vincent scooped her up. She weighed almost nothing.

Her arms wrapped around his neck instantly, her cheek pressing into his shoulder with the blind trust of a child who had no other options left.

Vincent’s chest tightened in a way that felt unfamiliar and dangerous.

Outside, engines roared. Black SUVs lined the curb like wolves.

As Vincent carried Rosie through the restaurant, people stared as if witnessing a glitch in reality. Men who had seen Vincent order disappearances without blinking now watched him cradle a child like she was precious cargo.

Niko opened the back door of the lead SUV. Vincent slid inside, Rosie in his lap. Her small fingers found his hand and clutched it, blood and all.

She didn’t speak again.

She just held on.

The city blurred past them in streaks of streetlight and shadow. Red lights meant nothing. Speed limits became suggestions. Vincent’s drivers cut through alleys and side streets with the confidence of men who knew every vein in the city’s body.

A trip that should have taken twenty minutes took seven.

The building Rosie named rose from the darkness like a tired tooth. Gray concrete. Windows boarded. Graffiti bleeding across the walls. The air smelled like damp trash and exhaustion.

Vincent carried Rosie up three flights of stairs. His men fanned out, weapons ready, but Vincent’s focus narrowed to one thing: the open door at the end of the hall.

Apartment 3B.

The door hung off a hinge.

Inside, the lights were on too bright, like the room had been forced awake.

Vincent stepped over the threshold and felt the temperature of the world change.

A woman lay on the floor.

At first glance, she looked dead. Blood pooled beneath her head, dark against worn linoleum. One eye swollen shut. Mouth split. Bruises blooming like cruel flowers across her cheekbones. Her arm bent at an angle that made something in Vincent’s stomach go cold.

Rosie wriggled out of his arms with a sound that was half sob, half prayer.

“Hannah!” she screamed, throwing herself onto the woman’s body. “Hannah, wake up! I brought help! Please!”

The woman’s remaining eye fluttered.

She looked at Rosie first. Only Rosie.

Her voice came out like sandpaper. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

Beaten within inches of her life, and her first thought was still her sister.

Vincent had seen violence all his life. He had delivered it, ordered it, watched it turn men into monsters and monsters into legends. He’d told himself he was immune.

He was wrong.

This was different.

This wasn’t a rival who had chosen the game. This wasn’t a deal gone bad. This was a woman in a collapsing apartment, trying to keep a child alive, and someone had decided her suffering was entertainment.

Something ancient and terrible rose in Vincent, not hot rage but cold fury, the kind that sharpened rather than burned.

He knelt beside them. “She’s safe,” he said, voice steady. “You’re both safe now.”

The woman’s gaze flicked to him, wary even through pain. Survival lived in her face.

Vincent turned his head. “Ambulance. Now. Tell them to meet us. St. Brigid Medical.”

Marco was already moving, phone to his ear, voice clipped.

Vincent slid an arm under the woman’s shoulders, another beneath her knees. She weighed more than Rosie, but still less than she should have, like life had been taking bites out of her for years.

As he lifted her, her breath hitched, and Vincent felt the fragile truth: she was alive, but barely.

Rosie clung to Vincent’s leg, crying silently now, as if her tears had run out.

In the hallway, footsteps echoed, someone running.

Niko peeked into the stairwell. “He bailed. Heard the cars.”

Vincent didn’t look away from the woman in his arms.

“Find out who,” he said simply.

The ambulance met them at the curb, lights flashing blue across cracked pavement. Paramedics moved fast, but faster still were Vincent’s men, clearing space like a storm clearing trees.

At St. Brigid, staff were waiting before the ambulance doors opened. This hospital, like La Corona, was technically owned by a corporation. In reality, it was another piece of Vincent’s invisible empire.

When Vincent Moretti made a call, people moved.

In the private waiting suite outside surgery, Rosie sat curled on a couch, feet wrapped in warm bandages a nurse had applied with gentle hands. She hugged a pillow to her chest as if it could keep her from falling apart.

Vincent sat across from her, elbows on knees, staring at a painting on the wall he hadn’t noticed in ten years of owning the place.

He had never waited like this before.

When the door to the surgical wing swallowed the woman, time did something ugly. It stretched. It dragged. It made each minute feel like a test of endurance.

Rosie’s voice finally broke the silence.

“Is she going to die?” she whispered.

Vincent’s throat tightened. He didn’t like questions he couldn’t control.

“The doctors are doing everything,” he said.

“That’s not what I asked.” Rosie’s chin trembled. “Do you promise?”

Promises again.

Vincent looked at her small face, at the bruise of fear under her eyes, and he realized something: this child wasn’t asking for certainty. She was asking to not be alone in her terror.

He exhaled slowly.

“I promise,” he said again, and this time he meant it so hard it felt like a vow.

Rosie’s shoulders sagged. She slid sideways until her head rested against Vincent’s arm, and within minutes, exhaustion claimed her.

Vincent didn’t move. He let her sleep like she belonged there.

Marco stood near the window, looking like a man watching a legend re-write itself.

After hours, a surgeon finally emerged. “She’ll live,” the doctor said. “Cracked ribs, fractured wrist, facial trauma. But she’s stable.”

Vincent nodded once, relief slipping through him like light under a door.

But relief didn’t end the night. It only made room for something else.

Work.

Vincent took over an empty administrative office and turned it into a command center. Phones rang softly. Men came and went with folders and grim faces. Names surfaced like oil on water.

By dawn, Marco set a file on Vincent’s desk.

“Her name’s Hannah Pierce,” Marco said. “Twenty-seven. Works three jobs. No priors. No family on record except the kid, Rosie.”

Vincent flipped through photos: Hannah behind a coffee counter, tired smile; Hannah carrying grocery bags up those same stairs; Hannah sitting on a curb with Rosie, hair windblown, face turned toward her sister like Rosie was the sun.

“Abuser?” Vincent asked.

Marco’s jaw clenched. “Cole Mercer. Twenty-nine. Started dating her two years ago. He’s with the Northside Serpents now. Reports to Darius Knox. Street name: Viper.”

Vincent’s fingers still.

“Go on.”

Marco hesitated, then pushed another sheet forward. “Viper knew Rosie’s medical condition.”

Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

“He set it up. Mercer got close on purpose. Made Hannah depend on him. Then turned controlling. Then violent. The plan was to push her into desperation so Viper could ‘offer’ her a loan for the surgery.”

Vincent’s chest tightened again, but this time with disgust.

“And when she couldn’t pay it back…”

Marco didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.

Vincent stared at the wall behind his desk, seeing not plaster but patterns. The way predators always chose the same prey. The way desperation was a currency in neighborhoods no one cared about.

“Meeting,” Vincent said, voice quiet.

Marco blinked. “Boss?”

“Call Viper. Tell him I want a meeting tonight. Two a.m. Old freight warehouse on Delaware.”

Marco swallowed. “He’ll think it’s a negotiation.”

Vincent’s mouth didn’t move, but something like a smile ghosted at the edge of his face.

“Let him.”

Upstairs, Hannah slept under a haze of medication and pain. When she woke later, sunlight spilled across a ceiling so clean it looked unreal.

She tried to sit up, panicked, body screaming. “Rosie—”

Rosie was there, curled in a chair by the window, wearing a borrowed sweatshirt and clutching crayons.

Relief hit Hannah so hard she cried.

Then the door opened, and Vincent stepped in.

Hannah’s good eye sharpened instantly. “Who are you?”

“Vincent Moretti,” he said.

Her face tightened like a fist. Even in Graymont, people knew that name. They knew the rumors. They knew the fear.

“I can’t pay you,” she rasped. “I don’t have money. I don’t have anything.”

“I’m not asking for payment,” Vincent said.

Hannah stared at him as if he’d spoken in a language she didn’t trust.

“People don’t do things for nothing,” she whispered. “So what do you want?”

Vincent looked at Rosie, who glanced up and offered him a small, cautious smile, then went back to her drawing as if crayons could rebuild the world.

Vincent’s voice softened. “Your sister walked through hell to save you.”

“That doesn’t explain you,” Hannah said, though her voice wobbled.

“It does,” Vincent replied, and then he turned and left before she could find the words to argue.

Two hours later, a cardiologist delivered the blow Hannah had been avoiding for years.

Rosie’s congenital heart defect had worsened.

“She needs surgery within two to three weeks,” the doctor said gently. “We can’t wait longer.”

Hannah’s breath hitched. “How much?”

“About eighty thousand,” the doctor answered, and the number sat on Hannah’s chest like a stone.

Hannah’s hands trembled. “I have twelve thousand,” she whispered. “I can get more. I’ll work more hours. I’ll—”

The door opened again.

Vincent stood there like a shadow in a suit.

“Schedule it,” he told the doctor. “Best surgeon. Whatever it costs.”

Hannah shook her head violently, tears sliding down her bruised face. “No. You can’t. Why are you doing this?”

Vincent walked to Rosie’s side. Rosie held up her drawing: two stick figures holding hands beneath a rainbow. Hannah + Rosie written in crooked letters.

Vincent stared at it longer than a man like him should.

Then he looked at Hannah, and for a second, the steel in his eyes cracked enough to show something human underneath.

“Because someone reminded me,” he said quietly, “that courage still exists.”

Hannah’s voice broke. “Courage doesn’t pay hospital bills.”

“No,” Vincent said. “But it changes what people choose to do.”

He nodded at the doctor. “Do it.”

And he left Hannah with a room full of clean walls and impossible hope.

That night, at two a.m., the freight warehouse on the Delaware River glowed under industrial floodlights. Rusted beams. Broken windows. Cold wind slicing through gaps in metal like the building itself was exhaling.

Darius “Viper” Knox arrived with swagger, snake tattoo crawling up his throat, eight men behind him. He smiled like a man who had never been forced to apologize in his life.

Vincent arrived with Marco and a handful of men, seemingly outnumbered.

Viper spread his arms. “Moretti. Heard you’ve been playing guardian angel to some girl from Graymont.”

Vincent didn’t respond.

Viper’s grin sharpened. “Why do you care? She’s nobody. Her little brat’s sick. That’s not your problem.”

The click of safeties echoed.

Vincent’s men lifted their weapons in unison, not frantic but precise.

Vincent’s voice was low. “Say that again.”

Viper’s smile faltered, then returned with forced bravado. “You come here with five guys and think you can—”

Vincent snapped his fingers.

Floodlights exploded to life along the walls and catwalks.

Thirty armed men emerged from the shadows, weapons trained.

Viper’s crew froze.

The swagger died.

Viper swallowed hard. “What is this?”

Vincent stepped closer. Not fast. Not dramatic. Certain.

“This is the part where you learn what a real line looks like,” Vincent said.

He spoke calmly, laying out the facts like a prosecutor: protection money, targeted mothers, the loan trap, Mercer as bait. Each sentence tightened the noose of truth around Viper’s throat.

Viper tried to laugh. It came out thin. “Business is business.”

Vincent reached into his pocket and pulled out Rosie’s drawing. He held it up under the harsh light.

“You want to know the difference between you and me?” he asked quietly. “I’ve done terrible things. But I’ve never built my power by hunting women and children.”

Viper’s eyes flicked to the drawing, then away as if shame might stain him.

Vincent folded the paper carefully and placed it back over his heart.

“Here’s what happens,” Vincent said. “You leave Graymont. You return every dollar you stole. You hand over Cole Mercer. And you apologize to Hannah Pierce.”

Viper’s mouth opened in disbelief. “On my knees?”

“Yes.”

Viper’s gaze darted, calculating, searching for a crack in the trap.

Vincent leaned in just enough for Viper to feel his presence like winter.

“You have two choices,” Vincent murmured. “Do it and live. Or refuse and learn why fear has a long memory.”

Viper’s legs buckled.

He dropped to his knees on the stained concrete, his voice breaking. “I’ll do it. Everything. I swear.”

Vincent held his gaze, letting the moment sink in like a brand.

“If you break your word,” Vincent said softly, “there will be nowhere left for you to run.”

By dawn, the Serpents vanished from Graymont. Word traveled fast: collections stopped. Threats stopped. Men who had lived with their heads down began to lift their faces and breathe.

Viper left the city that same night.

And Cole Mercer was found hours later at a bus station, clutching a ticket and pretending he wasn’t shaking. Vincent’s men didn’t kill him. They didn’t need to.

They delivered him to a detective with a file full of photos, hospital records, witness statements, and a confession extracted not by torture but by the sudden, terrifying certainty that lies no longer worked.

Cole Mercer went to prison.

Hannah, when she learned, didn’t celebrate. She just sat beside Rosie’s hospital bed and cried until her bruises hurt, because some part of her had been bracing for a life where monsters always won.

Two weeks later, Rosie went into surgery.

Vincent didn’t stand in the operating room. He wasn’t that kind of savior. He waited in the same private suite, hands clasped, eyes on the door like it held the answer to whether the world could still be repaired.

When the surgeon finally came out smiling, Vincent exhaled a breath he felt like he’d been holding for ten years.

“It was a success,” the surgeon said. “Her heart is strong. She’s going to be okay.”

Hannah covered her mouth, sobbing silently, shoulders shaking with relief so big it looked like it might break her in half.

Vincent watched her and realized something quietly devastating:

Some people survived their whole lives without ever being held by safety.

They survived anyway.

Three months later, spring arrived, and Graymont looked less like a wound and more like a neighborhood.

Rosie ran down sidewalks in light-up sneakers, laughing like her lungs belonged to her. Hannah’s wrist healed. Her ribs stopped screaming. Her face lost its swelling, leaving only faint scars, the kind that didn’t ruin beauty but deepened it, like punctuation in a story that refused to end early.

And on a street a little closer to downtown, a small flower shop opened with a hand-painted sign:

ROSE & RAIN.

Hannah stood behind the counter on opening day with her hands shaking, not from fear but from the unfamiliar sensation of possibility.

Vincent had bought the lease quietly. Paid for renovations. Left her a set of keys without speeches.

When she tried to refuse, he’d said only, “Consider it a reset. The world owes you a few clean pages.”

Hannah still didn’t trust kindness easily. She inspected it the way people inspect food after being starved, suspicious it might be poisoned.

But Rosie trusted.

Rosie always had.

Every Sunday, a black SUV parked outside Rose & Rain. Vincent stepped out, not with a parade, just with a small paper bag of pastries and a bouquet that Hannah pretended she didn’t like receiving as much as she did.

He sat in the chair by the window while Rosie told him stories about school and friends and how she could run the fastest in gym now.

Marco noticed the change in his boss, the quiet thawing of a man who had lived like ice for a decade.

One evening, as they drove away from the shop, Marco finally said what had been hovering between them like smoke.

“You’ve changed.”

Vincent stared out at the city lights, reflecting off the river like scattered coins.

“Maybe,” he said.

Marco hesitated. “Is it… dangerous?”

Vincent’s mouth tightened. “Everything worth having is.”

On a Sunday afternoon washed in gold light, Rose & Rain was closed to customers. Inside, Hannah brewed coffee. Rosie sat on the floor with crayons, tongue poking out in concentration as she drew a new masterpiece.

Vincent sat by the window with a newspaper he wasn’t reading.

Rosie climbed onto the armrest of his chair, fearless.

“Uncle Vin,” she said, because the name had decided itself over time, “I have a question.”

Vincent set the newspaper aside. “Go ahead.”

Rosie’s brow furrowed. “Why did you save Hannah?”

Hannah’s hands stilled at the coffee machine. She didn’t turn around, but Vincent could see tension pull her shoulders tight. That question carried weight. It carried history. It carried the fear that kindness always ended with a bill.

Vincent looked at Rosie’s face, bright and alive. He looked at Hannah’s careful movements, the way she still flinched at sudden noises, the way she loved Rosie with the ferocity of someone who had raised her through fire.

Then he answered honestly, even if honesty felt like stepping onto thin ice.

“Because you reminded me,” Vincent said, “that I don’t have to stay the worst version of myself.”

Rosie blinked. “I did?”

Vincent’s eyes softened. “You ran into a room full of men who frighten adults. You didn’t care. You just wanted your sister to live.”

Rosie thought hard, then grinned. “So I’m kind of a hero.”

Hannah let out a laugh that sounded startled, like it had been hiding inside her for years and finally escaped.

Vincent looked at her, and something unspoken moved between them: gratitude, understanding, and the slow, cautious beginnings of trust.

Sometimes salvation didn’t arrive as a shining angel.

Sometimes it arrived as a child with bare feet and trembling hands, choosing the biggest monster in the room and demanding he act like a man.

And sometimes, in saving someone else, you discovered the part of yourself you’d buried wasn’t dead. It was just waiting.

Outside, the neighborhood hummed with ordinary life: a bike bell, a dog barking, a neighbor waving. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic.

Just the quiet miracle of peace.

Hannah watched Rosie draw, then looked at Vincent. Her voice was soft.

“Thank you,” she said. “For not making me pay for surviving.”

Vincent held her gaze. For once, he didn’t hide behind coldness.

“Someone once told me,” he said, “that love is weakness.”

Hannah’s eyes narrowed, wary.

Vincent continued, calm and certain. “They were wrong. Love is what makes you stand back up.”

Rosie popped up suddenly, holding her drawing like a flag. It showed three stick figures now. One tall. One taller. One small. All holding hands under a messy rainbow.

“Look!” Rosie announced proudly. “It’s us.”

Hannah’s breath caught.

Vincent took the paper carefully, as if it mattered.

Because it did.

And for the first time in ten years, Vincent Moretti felt the vow he’d made at a grave loosen like a knot finally giving way.

Not because the past stopped hurting.

But because the future had finally shown up, barefoot and brave, and refused to leave.

THE END