Chapter 6 - A New Dawn Over the EstateThree months later.
The spring sun beamed down brilliantly over the restored gardens of the Milan estate. The flowerbeds that had been churned up by my helicopter blades were now overflowing with vibrant red tulips and blooming white hydrangeas.
Inside the nursery, the air smelled of fresh linen, watercolor paints, and vanilla-scented candles.
I sat cross-legged on the plush rug in the middle of the floor, wearing a casual linen shirt instead of my usual three-piece armor. In my hands, I held a battered little red toy car with a chipped paint job and a missing wheel.
Across from me sat Ethan.
The bandage on his cheek was gone, replaced by a faint, fading pink scar that added a touch of resilience to his youthful face. His dark eyes—so impossibly like his mother’s—sparked with joy as he rolled a wooden block across the rug toward me.
“Your turn, Daddy!” he laughed, his voice ringing clear and musical through the sunlit room.
I smiled, rolling the red car back across the floor. “Careful, buddy. This car has been through a lot of wars. It knows how to drive fast.”
Ethan giggled, snatching the toy up and hugging it tightly against his chest before crawling over and throwing his small arms around my neck, burying his face in my shoulder.
I wrapped my arms around him, holding him close, feeling the steady, healthy thud of his heart against mine.
Downstairs, the estate was quiet—not with the cold, intimidating silence of a mafia fortress, but with the warm, chaotic, beautiful noise of a real home. My phone sat silent on the desk in my study. The Council of Shadows had sent several messages trying to renegotiate the multi-billion-dollar deal, but I had instructed my second-in-command to reject every single one of them for the foreseeable future.
No empire, no contract, and no amount of money could ever buy back a single second of my son’s childhood.
May you like
I kissed the top of Ethan’s dark curls, breathing in the scent of baby shampoo and fresh air, knowing that the storms had finally passed.
We had survived the darkness. And as the morning sun flooded the nursery with golden light, I knew that no matter what enemies waited beyond our iron gates, nothing could ever touch us again.
