“Because I knew her.”
Dante Russo heard himself say it and almost did not recognize his own voice.
It was too soft.
Too exposed.
Too much like the man he had been before a coffin, a car fire, and seven years of grief had hardened every kind part of him into something useful.
The three little girls stared at him from the sidewalk beneath the closed boutique’s striped awning.
Newbury Street moved around them as if the city had no idea that Dante’s world had just split open.
Cars hissed over damp pavement.
A delivery cart rattled over a curb.
Somewhere behind him, a woman laughed into a phone.
The little girl with the folded scarf around her shoulders blinked up at him.
“Were you her friend?”
Dante looked down at the canvas in his hands.
Elena Ward’s painted face looked back from a small rectangle of cheap stretched cloth, sunlight bright on her cheek, her green eyes alive with private laughter.
His throat closed.
“Yes,” he said. “I was.”
The boldest sister clutched the money to her chest.
She had taken the bills because starvation teaches children to accept what pride would refuse.
But fear had not left her face.
Her eyes moved over Dante’s black coat.
Then Nico.
Then the two other men behind him, all dressed too dark, too still, too trained to blend into a crowd without becoming part of it.
Dante saw the decision form in her tiny body.
The shift of her foot.
The tightening of her fingers.
The way she angled herself toward her sisters before she moved.
“No,” he said, but he was too late.
She grabbed both girls by the sleeves and ran.
“Nico,” Dante snapped.
His men moved fast.
They always moved fast.
But Newbury Street was crowded, and children with nothing to lose can vanish better than professionals.
The girls slipped between shoppers, ducked around a delivery cart, darted past a man with garment bags over one arm, and disappeared into a side street while Dante stood with Elena’s face pressed against his palm.
Nico returned breathing hard.
“Lost them, boss.”