“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” THE FIANCÉE SCREAMED AT THE MAID — SECONDS LATER, THE MAFIA BOSS…

PART 1

“Get out of my house, you and that filthy little brat.”

Her voice tore through the marble hallway like broken glass. The three-year-old girl didn’t cry. She didn’t run. She didn’t even blink. She just stood there in her tiny duck socks, one small hand still clutching a gold button she’d found on the floor moments earlier, the other frozen midair — still reaching up, as if offering it to the woman who had just screamed at her.

Her mother, the maid, dropped to her knees so fast her apron tore against the marble. Four years of silence. Four years of invisible mornings and swallowed pride. And now this — her daughter standing perfectly still in front of a woman wearing a diamond ring worth more than everything Nadia had ever owned in her life.

Nobody in that hallway moved. Not the butler holding a silver tray that had begun to tremble in his hands. Not the housekeeper standing in the archway, mouth slightly open, forgotten mid-sentence. Not the little girl, still holding out that gold button, still waiting for someone — anyone — to take it from her hand.

Then, from the top of the grand staircase: a single sound. One footstep. Then another. Slow, heavy, deliberate. The kind of footsteps that don’t hurry because they don’t have to. The kind that make an entire house hold its breath.

He had been standing at the top of those stairs longer than anyone realized. He had heard the scream. He had heard the silence that followed it. And he had seen something from that height that nobody else in the hallway had seen yet — something in the little girl’s face, something in her eyes that made his hand tighten on the banister until his knuckles turned white. Because Dante Vitale had spent four years walking past this child in the hallways of his own estate. Four years nodding politely at her mother. Four years telling himself the small ache he felt every time he saw those enormous dark eyes was nothing but coincidence.

He was about to find out he had been lying to himself for every single one of those four years.

—

Seven in the morning. The sky above the Hudson had not yet decided what color it wanted to be — gray at the edges, pale gold at the center. The Vitale estate sat on twelve acres of private land, tucked behind a wrought-iron gate fourteen feet high, cameras hidden in the stone pillars, so small most guests never noticed. To the outside world, it was the home of a real estate developer — discreet, expensive, boring in the way only very wealthy men could afford to be boring. To the men who whispered in back rooms across five boroughs, it was something else entirely. It was the seat of the Vitale family, and had been for three generations.

The kitchen entrance sat around the back, past the garden and the small stone fountain that had not run water since October. That was where Nadia Reyes entered every morning at exactly 6:45, the way she had for four years. Thirty-one years old, dark hair pulled back so tightly her forehead looked drawn thin, hands rough at the knuckles and calloused across the pads of her fingers — four years of polishing floors other people walked across without looking down.

She set her bag on the small wooden chair by the pantry. In the corner, folded neatly, was a small quilted blanket, and on top of it a stuffed rabbit with ears bent from too many nights of being held tight. Her daughter Mila would come down soon, still in her pajamas, still rubbing sleep from her eyes.

Nadia turned to the coffee machine and measured the grounds, her mind drifting the way it always did in quiet moments — back to a morning four years ago. Her first day on the job. Walking into the front hallway with a mop bucket, seeing him cross the marble floor toward the door. Just a glimpse, a profile she would have known anywhere. Her hands had shaken so badly she’d spilled coffee across the counter.

Something in the estate this morning felt different. Wrong, somehow. She could not name it. She only felt it in her chest.

PART 2

Dante Vitale was already awake. Had been since five. He sat at a heavy walnut desk that had belonged to his father and his father’s father before that, a small brass lamp casting warm light across the leather blotter, an untouched espresso beside it. He was thirty-eight, black hair silvering at the temples the past two years, lines at the corners of his eyes that could not be explained by age alone. Still hands. The stillness of a man who had learned decades ago that movement drew attention in the underworld stretching from the harbors of Brooklyn to the loading docks of New Jersey.

The name Don Vitale was spoken in whispers. But he had a rule — some called it a weakness. He did not bring the dirty work home. The estate was a separate country. Inside these walls, the housekeepers were paid on time. Mr. Alden, who had served three generations of Vitales, was addressed by his surname out of respect. In return, they gave him something more valuable than loyalty. They gave him silence.

His morning walk was ritual. Down the second-floor corridor, past portraits of men who no longer breathed, down the grand staircase, through the front hallway — and always a slight detour, a quiet turn left into the narrow passage past the back kitchen. He never entered. He only slowed.

For four years, he had slowed at that corner. There was a child who sat there sometimes — small, dark-haired, enormous eyes. She would look up when he passed. Sometimes she smiled. He always found himself nodding and walking on. Those eyes. He had spent four years telling himself they meant nothing, that the ache he felt beneath his ribs was a trick of memory. His mother had died when he was twelve, on a road outside Naples, on a night his father had never fully explained. Her eyes had been dark like that. Wide like that. *Coincidence,* he told himself. *That was all.*

He turned the corner this morning, expecting the small blanket, the stuffed rabbit, the girl bent over a book.

The blanket was empty.

PART 3

To understand what had gone wrong in this house, one had to go back six months — to the day a second convoy of black cars had rolled through the iron gate for the first time. Isabella Rossi, twenty-eight, the only daughter of Salvatore Rossi, don of Chicago. Pale wheat hair cut sharp at the jaw, eyes green and cold as something pulled from earth where nothing grew.

She had not come for love. Ten years earlier, the Vitale and Rossi families had fought a quiet war over shipping routes between New York and the Great Lakes. It had made widows — twelve by some counts. Now the truce required a ring. The engagement had been announced at a private dinner, two dons shaking hands, and Isabella had been placed in a car and sent east.

She had swept past Mr. Alden’s welcome without a word. Twenty minutes later, moving through the west corridor, she’d passed the back kitchen and seen the small blanket, the stuffed rabbit, the child turning pages of a picture book.

“What,” she’d said, “is that.”

Nadia had risen slowly. “My daughter, Miss Rossi. She stays with me during the day.”

Isabella had looked at Mila for one long moment. “A servant’s child living in the Vitale estate. How very quaint.” She’d walked on.

That night, Mr. Alden had knocked quietly on Dante’s study door. “Boss, I do not like the coldness in her. I have seen women like her before. She is not kind to those who cannot fight back.”

Dante had thanked him. Then he’d left for a meeting at the harbor that ran until four in the morning.

Six months of planning had led to that Tuesday morning in November.

—

Mila had woken early. Three years old, she didn’t know what time it was — only that the sparrows outside were louder than usual and the light through the curtain was the pale silver kind that meant the day was still a secret. She could hear her mother’s coffee cup clinking in the kitchen. She slid off her blanket, pulled on her yellow duck socks, patted the stuffed rabbit’s ear once, and walked into the long, quiet corridor in her socks, feeling like the world belonged to her.

She almost reached the base of the grand staircase when she saw it — something small, something bright, resting against the leg of a heavy console table. A tiny gold button, the kind sewn onto the sleeve of a wool coat, forgotten by someone who owned a hundred coats. To Mila, it was the sun made small. She crouched, closed her fingers around it, and stood up glowing.

She did not see the woman coming down the stairs until she was already in her path.

Isabella was on the fourth step, white silk robe catching morning light, a delicate porcelain cup steaming in one hand. She had woken early for a reason of her own and was not in the mood to be delayed.

Mila looked up and did what three-year-olds do when they’ve found something wonderful. She held the button out with both hands.

“Pretty,” she whispered.

For one small breath, something moved behind Isabella’s green eyes — something almost like softness. Given a single second more, it might have grown into a different morning altogether.

It did not get that second.

Isabella lowered the cup to the handrail with a sharp click. Her eyes hardened. “Where is your mother?”

Around the corner, Nadia froze mid-step, apron bunched in her hand. The scream had already left Isabella’s mouth. It had already torn through the marble. The button had already fallen. Nadia was already on her knees, arms wrapped so tightly around Mila that the child’s face pressed into the fabric of her uniform.

And from the top of the grand staircase, one footstep had already sounded.

Dante came down without hurry. Black trousers, charcoal shirt open at the collar, no jacket. His jaw was set in a way the men in that hallway had seen perhaps three times in a decade. Every head lowered as he passed — the butler, the men at the door, the housekeeper, the young bodyguard whose hand had drifted toward his weapon.

He reached the marble floor. He did not glance at Isabella. He crossed to the small kneeling figures near the console table and did the thing no man in that house had ever seen him do.

He lowered himself onto one knee.

The don of New York knelt in front of a three-year-old girl. He reached slowly for the small gold button that had rolled against the table leg, closed his fingers around it, and held it out to Mila without a word.

She peeked from her mother’s shoulder. Her cheeks were wet. But when she saw the button in his palm, she did not flinch — she reached out and closed her small fingers around it, and around the tip of his thumb, and looked up at him.

For a long, still moment, the whole room disappeared. There was only her face. Her enormous dark eyes. And in them, something that struck him beneath the ribs like a blade being drawn.

He knew.

He rose slowly, pressed the button gently into her palm, and turned to Isabella. His voice was quiet, but every soul in the hallway heard it clearly.

“Nadia and Mila are not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever.” Isabella did not move. “Upstairs,” he said. “Now.”

She went. Her silk robe whispered against the steps.

He turned to the others. “Out.”

They vanished like smoke.

The sunlight had begun to climb higher through the tall east window, long stripes of pale gold spilling across the marble. Nadia did not move. She kept her head bowed, forehead resting against her sleeping daughter’s dark hair.

Dante stood a few feet away, watching. When he spoke, his voice was low, rough in a way he hadn’t allowed for years.

“Nadia. Look at me.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes were wet — she hadn’t even known she was crying.

“Why have you never told me she is our daughter?”

The air went out of her lungs. She held Mila tighter. She opened her mouth to lie — four years of practice had taught her to lie without moving her face — but the words would not come.

“She has my mother’s eyes,” Dante said gently. “I’ve noticed for months. I did not dare believe it. But I know.”

She began to cry then — the quiet kind, the kind that lives in the throat of a woman who has kept a secret so long it’s become part of her breathing.

“I tried to reach you,” she whispered. “I called. I sent messages. Three calls. Seven messages. You never answered.”

His face did not change. But something behind his eyes did, because he had never received a single call, never seen a single message. And there was only one person from that year who had held the keys to his phone.

He said, softly, “Take her to the kitchen. Stay there. Do not open the door for anyone but me.” Then he turned and began climbing the stairs.

—

Four years earlier — a rain-soaked March night, a charity gala at the Plaza, Dante slipping out through a service door to breathe. A caterer in uniform, hiding in a back corridor. *Sorry, I’ll move,* she’d said. *No,* he’d said. *Stay. I am hiding too.* Two hours of conversation. Three more nights after that — a coffee shop in Brooklyn, a walk along the river, a small apartment with a knocking radiator and tea in a chipped blue cup. Then, at three in the morning, his phone had rung. His father was in the ambulance. He’d left without a note. He’d never gone back.

Dante sat now at his desk and opened a private archive — every device assigned to him for nine years, every SIM card, every backup kept quietly by his security team. He set the date range to that spring and summer. He filtered by unknown numbers.

Nothing. Not one call. Not one message flagged for review.

He knew what that meant, because in that particular spring, there had been exactly one other person who held the keys to every device in his name. One person who had protected him during the three months his father was dying, and the three months after, when the family had teetered on the edge of a war of succession. Vittorio Conti. His father’s right hand for twenty-two years.

Six months after that spring, Vittorio had been caught selling names and shipping routes to a rival family for a payoff. Dante had handled it himself — quietly, cleanly. Vittorio was serving twenty-two years upstate. Dante had thought that was the whole of his betrayal.

He had been wrong. Vittorio had decided, that spring, that a caterer with a chipped blue cup could not be allowed near a boy about to become don. Three calls, seven messages. None had ever reached him.

Dante lowered his face into his hands. Four years, and no way in the world to give them back.

—

Downstairs, Nadia remembered the pharmacy test on Atlantic Avenue, the two lines, the rain on her walk home, hand pressed to her stomach. The calls that went to voicemail. The messages that sat unread and then went quiet, one by one. By the fourth month she had believed — had made herself believe — that a man like that had many women, that a caterer with a small apartment was easy to forget. She had given birth alone in a public hospital in Queens and named her daughter Mila. Three years later, tired of double shifts, she’d signed with a housekeeping agency. The assignment read only *Vitale Residence, Hudson River.* The name meant nothing to her — until her first morning, when a man crossed the marble floor toward the door, and her heart stopped in her chest.

She could have run. She stayed, because Mila needed a life, and because some small unreasonable part of her wanted, even from the far edge of a marble hallway, to be near him again.

—

Dante rose from the desk and turned left, toward Isabella’s suite. He did not knock.

She stood by the tall window facing the rose garden, pale gray dress, hair pinned smooth. She did not turn. “So it is true,” she said. “She is yours.”

He closed the door behind him. She let out a thin, dry sound that was not quite laughter.

“I knew. The way you came down those stairs. The way you knelt on that floor. A man like you does not kneel for a housekeeper’s child.” She turned finally, eyes dry, and then something behind the careful lines of her face began to give way — not tears, something quieter. The kind of collapse that happens when a wall decides today is the day it comes down.

“Eight months ago I flew to Zurich alone,” she said. “I told my father it was a spa week. A private clinic, very discreet. The doctor told me I have advanced endometriosis. The chance of my ever carrying a child to term is, in his words, functionally zero.” Her hands were folded in her lap. “I did not tell my father. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell you. In our world, Dante, a woman who cannot give a don an heir is a bad investment. My family had already signed the paperwork. The alliance was already worth more than I was.”

Her voice did not rise. “I loved you, in my way. Not you exactly — I loved the seat. I loved the name. I am telling you because there is no reason not to now.” She looked back to the window. “Every time I saw that child in the hallway, I saw the one thing I would never have, and I hated her for it. I hated her mother for it.” Her jaw tightened. “It was not her fault. I know that. I still could not stand to look at her.”

Dante stood very still by the door and listened to every word. She did not say the thing she had already done that week — that she had already written to her father.

—

He needed to be certain. Not for himself — he had known from the second Mila’s eyes had lifted to his. He needed it for her, because a child would grow up, would ask questions, and he wanted the answer to be a piece of paper no one in this world could argue with.

At two in the morning he went to the back kitchen, where Nadia and Mila slept curled together on the small folding chair. He did not wake them. He lifted three strands of dark hair from a hairbrush on the counter, folded them carefully into paper. By four, an envelope had left the estate for a private laboratory that had served the Vitale family for two generations.

Three days passed, slow and thick. He did not attend meetings. He sat at his desk with the door open, watching Mila play in the garden below, chasing a fallen leaf in a navy coat too big at the shoulders. His eyes drifted, without his meaning them to, toward the portrait above the fireplace — Elena Vitale, twenty-nine in the painting, dark hair pinned to one side, eyes wide and soft and impossibly steady. Commissioned by his father six months after the car had gone off the road outside Naples. The same eyes he’d watched chase a leaf across the fountain path that afternoon.

On the third evening, the message came. *99.99% probability of paternity.*

He set the phone down, and Dante Vitale, who had not wept since they lowered his mother into the ground, put his hand over his eyes and wept quietly in the lamplight.

Ten minutes later he asked Mr. Alden to bring Nadia upstairs. He handed her the paper without speaking. Watched her read it.

“I want to be her father,” he said. “If she will let me. If you will let me.”

The next morning, Dante called Chicago. “Salvatore, it is Dante. The engagement is over. Your daughter is welcome to stay as a guest for as long as she needs to arrange her return, but there will be no wedding. No alliance in the form we agreed upon. I will send a formal letter by the end of the week.”

Seven seconds of silence colder than any threat he’d ever received.

“I see,” Salvatore said, and the line went dead.

Isabella did not scream, did not weep. She told Mr. Alden to send someone up with the boxes, and she packed for three days. On the second afternoon she stood at her window and watched Mila poke a puddle with a stick, and stayed there nearly an hour without moving.

On the morning of the fourth day, three black cars waited on the gravel. Isabella came down in a long camel coat, dry-eyed, and stopped when she saw Mila standing near the hallway with the stuffed rabbit under one arm. She knelt on the marble — something no one who knew her had ever seen her do — and drew a gold button from her coat pocket, one she’d found on the sofa the week before and kept without asking herself why.

She held it out. Mila took it with two careful fingers. “Pretty,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Isabella said. “It is.”

She walked out without looking back. Watching from the kitchen doorway, Nadia felt something rise in her chest that was not satisfaction. It was quieter than that. Closer to sorrow.

—

Three weeks passed, the quietest the estate had known in longer than anyone could remember — the way a house softens once the person quietly poisoning it has gone. Dante spent time with Mila, learning her the way a man learns a language he doesn’t yet speak. He bought her a jar of soap bubbles from a shop near the harbor and knelt on the flagstone path to show her how to dip the wand. Her laugh at the first wobbly bubble turned something over in his chest. He read to her at night, awkward at first, until by the fourth night she’d fallen asleep against his shoulder. He told her about her grandmother — that a woman named Elena had loved yellow roses and hated cold coffee, that she would have loved a granddaughter in duck socks.

He and Nadia rebuilt slowly, in small pieces, on the garden bench, at the kitchen table after Mila had gone to sleep.

But the underworld does not sleep for anyone.

Nine hundred miles away, Salvatore Rossi sat with his daughter’s letter on his desk — that Dante Vitale had a hidden heir, that her existence had ended the engagement. In their world, a hidden heir was a weakness, and a weakness was leverage. He called four men whose names appeared on no public record.

—

A Saturday afternoon in December, the season’s first thin snow drifting over Manhattan. Dante had said more than once that he didn’t want them living inside walls — a gate is a comfort and a cage at once. So Nadia dressed Mila in a navy coat and red mittens, and two men in dark overcoats walked with them to the park. They stayed to the quiet eastern path, well away from crowds, bodyguards Dane and Rafael a few paces behind.

Mila broke ahead onto a patch of grass, chasing a gray squirrel. Nadia smiled — the first real one in weeks.

She didn’t hear the engine at first. Only Dane did — a black van moving too fast for the lane. Then it stopped, the side door slid open, four men in ski masks came out running. Gunfire cracked. Dane went down. Rafael took two hits and fell. Nadia threw herself over Mila. *”Mama!”* The men were on them in three strides — a gloved hand at her collar, another at Mila’s coat. She twisted, kicked, held on until a pistol butt struck her temple and blood ran into her eye. They pried her fingers away and threw them both into the van.

In the churned snow where the struggle ended, a small gold button lay on its side, catching the pale winter light before the snow began to cover it.

Rafael dragged himself to his phone and dialed with a voice that could barely form words. “Boss. They took them.”

—

Dante rose from his chair mid-sentence in a Queens dining room. The phone slid from his fingers. The color left his face, replaced by something the men at the table had seen exactly once before.

“Gather everyone,” he said. “Now.”

By eight that evening the study had transformed — financial papers swept aside for a map of New York’s five boroughs, a detail of the Brooklyn waterfront pinned beside it. Thirty men filled the corridor. Marco, thirty-one, broad-shouldered, the one Dante had begun grooming to inherit the rougher work, stood at his shoulder with his jaw set.

Mr. Alden crossed the room slowly. “Boss. Let us go. You do not need to be the one—”

“That is my daughter, Alden.” Dante did not look up from the map. “That is the mother of my daughter. I will not sit here.”

The private phone rang — the number only twelve men in the country knew. Salvatore’s voice was calm, cold in the particular way of old money and old blood. His terms: every dock, every warehouse, every piece of paper that gave the Vitales the Manhattan waterfront, signed over by six in the morning. In exchange, the woman and child would be returned alive.

“Agreed,” Dante said. “Send the paperwork.” Then, to Marco: “The shoe. Check it now.”

Six months earlier, the same night the paternity result had come, Dante had asked his security team to place a tracker the size of a grain of rice into the sole of a pair of white sneakers left as a gift at Mila’s door — a precaution a don hopes never to use. The screen lit. A single blue dot pulsed over Red Hook. An abandoned warehouse on a dead street beside the water.

He crossed to a locked drawer and drew out his father’s pistol. Loaded six rounds. Slid it into his holster. Then he picked up a phone he had never dialed in his life and called the field office of the FBI.

—

Midnight, Red Hook. Fog thick over the East River. Dante crossed the last hundred yards on foot, Kevlar under his coat, Marco at his shoulder, six men in a loose crescent behind. He lifted his chin once. It was enough.

The door broke open. Gunfire cracked like breaking glass, echoing off iron walls. Dane and Rafael’s replacements moved room by room — a storage bay, a stairwell, an empty office. At the far end of the ground floor, behind a warped steel door, they found them.

Nadia, tied to a chair, blood dried down her temple. Mila crouched small in the corner, sneakers gone, rabbit clutched to her chest. She lifted her arms when she saw him.

Dante had taken three steps when a shadow shifted behind Nadia’s chair. Salvatore Rossi stepped into the light, pistol already raised, aimed at Mila.

“One more step, Vitale. This ends now.”

Dante stopped. Then he moved — not toward Salvatore, but to the corner, crossing in two strides, dropping to his knees and wrapping his body around his daughter, tucking her head against his chest.

The gunshot came. The bullet took him in the shoulder. He did not go down. He held.

Nadia screamed. The far door burst open — Marco, four men, too late for Salvatore to react. Dante did not raise his pistol to finish it, though every instinct trained into him since he was fourteen told him to. He rose, one arm still around Mila, crossed the room in three strides, and struck Salvatore once across the jaw with the flat of the gun. Drove him to the concrete. Pinned him with a knee to the chest, blood from his own shoulder dripping onto the old man’s cheek.

“You wanted a war, Rossi? You’ll get one. Not the kind you expected.”

Sirens cut through the fog. Federal agents came through the main doors — the call Dante had placed eleven hours earlier, the folder of years of quiet documentation on Rossi’s operations that would bury the Chicago family for a generation.

Salvatore was pulled up in cuffs, shouting threats as he was walked past. Dante didn’t look at him. He was already on his knees again, gathering Mila into his arms, her small face pressed into his chest, shaking but not crying.

Someone cut Nadia’s wrists free. She stumbled over and put her hand against the side of his face — the first tender thing she’d done to him in four years.

“I could not lose you again,” he whispered. “Either of you.”

—

Three weeks in a private hospital on the Upper East Side. The bullet had passed close to an artery — a quarter inch, the surgeon told Nadia quietly, would have made the difference between recovery and a coffin. She’d sat in the corridor with her hands over her face for nearly an hour.

Every afternoon at three, Nadia brought Mila in on her hip, and every afternoon Mila wriggled down and climbed onto the hospital bed without asking anyone’s permission. On the fourth day she brought the rabbit, tucked it against the pillow, adjusted its ears with two careful fingers, and looked up at Dante with serious eyes.

“Bun will help Papa get better.”

The word landed in the room like a soft weight. It was the first time she had called him that. His throat went tight. He drew her gently against his chest and held her while she chattered to the rabbit about which parts of the hospital had the best cookies. Nadia stood in the doorway with tears in her eyes and did not interrupt.

The day he was discharged, Dante called a meeting. Five chairs at the long table. He stood at the head, his arm still in a sling.

“For thirty years, this family has done what it needed to do to survive. I do not apologize for what my father built, or what I built after him. But I am not the man who came down those stairs a month ago.” He looked at Marco. “From today, you carry the seat. The docks, the freight, the routes, the rooms where the difficult decisions are made. All of it. I keep only what is legal.”

Marco rose slowly and bowed his head. “Boss. You will always be don to us.”

“No, Marco. From today, you are don. I am only a father.”

That week, Salvatore Rossi was sentenced to forty years in federal court. The Rossi family fractured within a month. That night, Dante slept through until morning for the first time in longer than he could remember.

—

A quiet December evening. The season’s first real snow drifted past the tall front windows, the rose garden gone white at the edges, the gate closed, no black cars on the gravel — the kind of stillness that comes to a house only after it has finally been allowed to rest.

Dante sat on the leather sofa in the living room, sling gone two weeks now, a book open on his knee that he read slowly, one page at a time, because he was in no hurry anymore. Nadia came in with two mugs of cocoa, no apron, hair loose against her shoulders, and settled beside him, her shoulder resting lightly against his.

Small footsteps sounded in the hallway. Mila ran in with the rabbit under one arm, climbed onto Dante’s lap the way a child climbs onto the lap of the person she has always belonged to, and settled with her back against his chest.

From her jumper pocket she drew something round and bright. The gold button — the one he’d found himself in the snow at the edge of the park, brushed clean, kept in his wallet for three months, and slipped that morning into the pocket of a small red jumper.

She held it up with both hands. “Pretty, Papa.”

He looked down at the button. He looked down at the enormous dark eyes lifted to his — his mother’s eyes, looking at him from his daughter’s face.

And Dante Vitale, the man who had once made an entire city hold its breath, wept for the second time in his adult life. Not from pain. From something far quieter, and far larger.

Nadia stood at his side with one hand pressed against her mouth.

Outside, the snow kept falling.