His Little Angel, his Greatest Weakness

Chapter 1: The Last Order The numbers didn't lie. That was the only reason Cal Rhys liked them. Dalton Street was up twelve percent. Product was moving clean through the north side, three new houses had opened, and the girls' count held steady. He signed the last page of the ledger and slid it across the desk like it was nothing. "Happy girls, happy business," Cassian said from the leather chair, sipping Cal's whiskey as he'd paid for it. "Happy ain't a number I track." Cassian laughed. He was thirty-three, four years older than Cal, with a smile that sat on his face like a borrowed coat. "That's why you're the boss, cousin." Cal didn't answer. He'd been the head of the Rhys family since he was twenty-four, when his uncle Augustus's heart gave out at the top of the Sunday table, and the whole room turned to look at the quiet kid in the corner. Five years. Five years of ledgers and funerals and men kissing his ring who'd have gladly spat on it if nobody was watching. Behind him, the city spread out in glass and light, forty floors down, and not one window in the penthouse opened. He'd had them sealed years ago. Safer that way. Nobody could shoot in, and nobody could climb up. Nobody could get out, either. He'd never thought about that part. "We got a problem," Cassian said. "We always got a problem." "Eddie Voss." Cal looked up. Eddie wasn't a stranger. The Family didn't do strangers. You were blood, or you were oath, or you were dead, and Eddie was oath. He'd married into the Family twelve years ago, sat at the Sunday table, and eaten Augustus's bread. "Skimming," Cassian said. "Eight months. Thirty-one grand a week outta the Dalton houses, straight to his own pocket. Found it in the books this morning." "He been warned?" "Twice." "Then handle it." That was it. No ranting, no pacing. Cal had learned a long time ago that the quieter the order, the faster it moved. He didn't ask how, and he didn't ask when. Handle it was a phrase with a range: a hard talk, a broken hand, a debt paid in cash or in blood, depending on the man. Everybody in the Family knew that. He reached for the next stack of paper. Cassian stood, buttoning his jacket. His smile stayed a half second too long, the way a man's does when he's already won something. Cal noticed. He filed it, like he filed everything, and went back to work. The call came at 11:40. Cal was alone in the study, tie off, glass empty, staring at nothing. The phone buzzed. He knew the number. Dutch Halloran had been cleaning up after the Family for twenty years, since before Cal could drive, and in all that time he had never once called after a job. "Boss." "This better be good." "Need you to come to Marlow Heights." Cal almost laughed. "Dutch. You know I don't do scenes." "I know." "Then why the f**k—" "There was a kid." Silence. The kind that has weight. "In the closet," Dutch said. His voice came out smaller than it should have. "Little girl. Maybe five. She ain't crying, Boss. She ain't saying nothing. I don't know what to do with her." "Handle it like you always handle it." "Boss." A pause. "I ain't doing that. Not to a kid. You can fire me. You can put a bullet in me. I'm not doing it." Cal stared at the dark window. Twenty years, and Dutch had never said no. Not once. "Don't touch her," Cal said. "I'm coming." He didn't know why he said it. Marlow Heights was the kind of neighborhood where the lawns were trimmed, and the cops were paid. The house was a two-story with a swing set in the yard. Cal took in the swing set, then wished he hadn't. Dutch waited on the porch with his hat in his hands. He was sixty and built like a mailbox, and he looked ten years older than he had that morning. "Hallway," Dutch said. "Don't look if you don't gotta." Cal looked. Eddie Voss lay on the floor, face-up, one shoe missing, tie still knotted. Two shots, close range. Clean. Not a hard talk, not a broken hand. There was no way to read or handle it here except the one way. Cal's jaw tightened. It was fast. Too fast. He'd said the word at noon, and by midnight it was done. "Whose men?" "Cassian's," Dutch said. He didn't blink. "Left an hour ago." "Where was the kid?" "Upstairs. Second door." Cal climbed. His shoes cost three hundred dollars apiece and made no sound on the carpet. The wall along the stairs was a gallery of a life: Eddie at a barbecue, Eddie with a little girl on his shoulders, Eddie and a dark-haired woman laughing beside a lake. The woman stopped showing up in the later pictures. Cal's eyes snagged on her face, and he felt something that wasn't quite memory, like a name on the tip of his tongue. He kept walking. Second door. A child's room, pink and yellow, stickers on the wall. The bedside lamp was still on. The closet door stood half open. "Hey," Cal said. Nothing. He crouched. His knees cracked, and he felt it for the first time in years: how stiff he was, how little like a person. In the corner of the closet, between a pile of dresses and a box of toys, sat a little girl in dinosaur pajamas. Dark hair, tangled. A stuffed rabbit with one ear chewed off, clamped against her chest. Her eyes were gray and too big for her face, and they looked at him the way you look at weather. Cal had been looked at by killers, cops, and men who wanted him dead. None of them had ever made him feel like this. Like he'd been weighed and found wrong. "I'm not gonna hurt you," he said. It sounded fake even to him. She tilted her head. "Is Papa sleeping?" His throat closed. He had ordered a lot of men dead. He'd never counted, because counting made it personal. He had never once had to see the one left behind, tucked in a closet with a rabbit, holding on to the hope that her father was only asleep. "Yeah," Cal heard himself say. "He's sleeping." The lie sat in the room like a dead thing. She nodded slowly, like she already knew. "What's your name?" "Maya." "Maya." He tried it out. "I'm Cal." "Okay." That was all. Just okay, like a kid who'd learned that people disappear and that asking why doesn't bring them back. Dutch appeared in the doorway. "Protocol says—" "Don't." "Boss, she's a witness. If Cassian finds out—" "I said don't." Dutch shut his mouth. But he was looking at the girl, and something crossed his face that Cal couldn't name. It looked almost like guilt. He looked away fast. Cal held out his hand. He didn't know what he expected. Maybe for her to run, or scream, or bite him. She put her small hand in his. It was warm and sticky and smelled like strawberry shampoo and gunpowder. She held on like she'd decided something, and it wasn't him she trusted. She was just tired of being alone. He picked her up. She weighed nothing. It was the lightest thing he'd ever carried, and somehow heavier than the whole damn empire. "Where we going?" Dutch asked quietly. Cal looked at the dead man in the hall, the swing set through the window, his own reflection in the glass: expensive suit, cold eyes, a man who couldn't open a window in his own home. "Home," he said. "Mine." He carried her out past the body, past the photos, past the swing set, and he didn't look back, because he already knew what he'd see. Not a house. Not a job. A mirror.