Chapter 2 - The Boys With Silver EyesThe more serious twin climbed out of the stroller first.
Elena made a sharp sound and caught the back of his jacket before his sneakers touched the pavement.
“Nico, no.”
The boy frowned.
“I dropped Mr. Buttons.”
His voice was small, annoyed, and utterly unafraid.
Dominic looked down at the stuffed rabbit wedged against the front wheel of his chair. Its white fur was worn gray around the ears. One button eye had been replaced with blue thread. A child had loved that rabbit hard.
Dominic leaned forward.
Marcus moved instantly.
“I’ll get it.”
Dominic stopped him with one raised hand.
The movement was slight, but every man around him obeyed.
With effort that made pain flash behind his eyes, Dominic reached down and picked up the rabbit himself. His fingers closed around soft fabric. Such a harmless little thing. Such a devastating little thing.
He held it out.
Nico looked at Elena.
Elena’s jaw tightened.
“It’s okay,” she said, though nothing in her voice sounded okay.
The boy took two careful steps toward Dominic. The armed men around them might as well have been trees. Nico’s gaze stayed on the wheelchair, then on Dominic’s face.
“Thank you,” he said.
Dominic swallowed.
“You are welcome.”
The second boy leaned sideways out of the stroller.
“I’m Rafa,” he announced. “He’s Nico. He talks less because he thinks more.”
Nico hugged the rabbit to his chest.
“That is not true.”
“Yes, it is.”
Dominic stared at them.
Nico and Rafa.
Names that had existed in the world for three years without him knowing.
Children who had learned to walk, speak, laugh, fall asleep, get sick, ask questions, and grow into his face while he sat in empty rooms convincing himself that loneliness was the price of mercy.
“How old are they exactly?” he asked.
Elena’s eyes flashed.
“You already asked that.”
“Answer me again.”
Her grip tightened on the stroller handle.
“They turned three on April nineteenth.”
Dominic’s hand curled against the armrest.
April nineteenth.
His mother’s birthday.
He looked up sharply.
Elena looked away.
The answer was there, buried beneath grief.
She had remembered.
Even after everything, she had remembered.
Marcus lowered his voice. “Boss, we need to move.”
Dominic did not look at him.
“Why?”
Marcus’s gaze swept over the RiverWalk. “Because people are staring.”
“They always stare.”
“Not like this.”
Dominic finally noticed the phones.
A woman near a coffee cart had stopped pretending she was taking pictures of the river. A man in a navy coat was watching too closely. Two teenagers whispered beside the railing.
A paralyzed crime boss. A vanished lover. Two children with his unmistakable eyes.
A story like that could travel faster than a bullet.
Elena saw the same thing.
Fear broke through her anger.
“We have to go.”
Dominic turned his chair, blocking her path without touching her.
“Where?”
“Home.”
“Where is home?”
“That is not your business.”
His voice dropped.
“They are my sons.”
“You lost the right to say that when you threw me out of your hospital room.”
The words landed exactly where she aimed them.
Dominic absorbed the blow.
Rafa looked between them.
“Mommy, do you know him?”
Elena closed her eyes.
For one impossible second, Dominic wanted her to lie. To protect the boys. To protect herself. To protect him from hearing what he deserved.
Instead, Elena knelt between the stroller and the boy standing near Dominic’s chair.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know him.”
Rafa pointed at Dominic.
“Is he a bad guy?”
The question silenced six armed men.
Dominic had been called many things by enemies, prosecutors, journalists, and terrified businessmen. Monster. King. Killer. Ghost. The Devil of the Docks.
None of those words had wounded him.
Bad guy, from the mouth of a child, nearly did.
Elena’s answer did not come quickly.
“He is someone from a long time ago,” she said.
Nico looked at Dominic with unsettling seriousness.
“Are you sick?”
Dominic glanced at his chair.
“No.”
“Then why do you sit?”
“Nico,” Elena warned.
Dominic shook his head.
“It is all right.”
He looked at his son.
“My legs do not work anymore.”
Nico considered that.
“Do they hurt?”
“Sometimes.”
Rafa leaned forward. “Can your chair go fast?”
Despite everything, Marcus coughed into his fist.
Dominic looked at Rafa.
“Yes.”
“How fast?”
“Faster than your mother would approve of.”
Rafa grinned.
The expression was Dominic’s own childhood smile, the one his father had beaten out of him before he turned ten.
Dominic could not speak.
Elena saw it. For a heartbeat, her anger softened, and what showed beneath it was worse.
Pain.
Then Marcus’s phone buzzed.
He read the message.
His face changed.
Dominic noticed.
“What?”
Marcus stepped close, keeping his voice low.
“Photo already hit a private channel.”
Elena straightened.
“What photo?”
Marcus looked at the boys, then at Dominic.
“Someone took a picture of this meeting. Caption says, ‘Caruso heirs found alive.’”
Elena went pale.
Dominic’s blood turned cold.
“How many people have seen it?”
“Hard to know. Enough.”
Elena backed up, pulling Nico against her side.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
Dominic turned toward his men.
“Cars. Now.”
Elena glared at him.
“We are not going anywhere with you.”
“You are already exposed.”
“Because of you.”
“Yes,” Dominic said. “Because of me.”
That admission stopped her.
He looked at Nico clutching the rabbit, at Rafa gripping the stroller bar, at the two living pieces of his heart he had never known existed.
Then he looked at Elena.
“I cannot change what I did,” he said. “But I know what happens when my enemies smell blood.”
Her face hardened.
“My sons are not blood.”
Dominic’s voice went quiet.
“No. They are the only innocent thing left in my name.”
A black SUV pulled to the curb with the rear door open.
Elena did not move.
For three years, she had built a life beyond him. A careful life. A hidden life. A life where bedtime stories mattered more than armored cars.
Now one photograph had cracked it open.
A siren wailed somewhere beyond the river.
Nico tugged Elena’s sleeve.
“Mommy?”
She looked down at him, then at Rafa.
Dominic watched the exact moment she made a decision she hated.
“Fine,” she said. “But my children ride with me. No guns near them. No shouting. No one touches them.”
Dominic nodded.
“Agreed.”
“And you do not get to call yourself their father.”
His jaw tightened.
But he nodded again.
Elena lifted Rafa from the stroller. Nico held her coat with one hand and the rabbit with the other.
As they moved toward the SUV, Dominic saw a man across the RiverWalk raise his phone and snap another picture.
Marcus saw him too.
“Want him stopped?”
Dominic looked at Elena helping their sons into the vehicle.
“No,” he said.
Marcus frowned.
“No?”
May you like
Dominic’s voice was low enough that only Marcus heard.
“Find out who he sends it to.”
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