Saving The Capo's Heir

Four

Mason

We sat in the office for hours—Esmé, Javier, and me—turning over scraps. She wanted to comb through every pixel, every log, every handshake that had happened in the week I’d been glued to this room. We had fragments: a van with blacked-out plates, ski masks, the flash of teeth in camera footage, a gloved hand closing a door. The men who took Aaliyah didn’t leave faces; they left messages. They stared into the camera before they left and smiled as if they’d already won.

None of it worked with facial recognition. Eyes and teeth don’t load into algorithms the way a full face does. We were building a puzzle from smoke.

It was two in the morning the first night we tried to force the world to give us answers. Esmé’s shoulders hunched over the monitors; dark circles carved into her cheekbones. She yawned once, a brief, human sound that made me feel like I’d been punched.

“You need sleep.” I said, leaning my head against the side of hers. She shook it off like a dog refusing water.

“Don’t say that,” she muttered. “Sleep is for the dead.”

“Esmé, I will not let you get yourself sick,” I insisted, standing and moving to pull my chair back. Javier had been sent away—he was reconstructing a dozen dead ends into threads while we argued down to which vendor had been the last to service hospital equipment. Esmé wanted personnel histories, last hires, family names. She wanted motives, blood ties. I didn’t tell her then that this wasn’t just a psych nurse who’d never had children and snapped—this had the smell of a contract, of something bought and placed.

That argument would have to wait until morning.

She pushed her chair out, stood, and I watched the way pain and fury rippled across her like wind across steel. “Mason—”

I moved before she could finish. “I will not let you get sicker. You can scream. You can break chairs. You can rip throats out with

your teeth, but tonight you will rest. You will eat. You will pump. Tomorrow we will burn the sky if we must. Thomas is with her. He holds a rifle the way other men breathe. He’ll keep Aaliyah safe.”

I walked to her, placed my hand on her cheek and pulled her head to my lips. My kiss was an apology and a promise. She tasted like salt and iron.

“Come on,” I said. “We have more dragons to slay tomorrow.”

She let me guide her out of the office, down the hall past the portraits of my in-laws—faces in oil with slicked-back hairstyles and eyes that had never forgiven weakness. The nursery door yawned open like someone had left a wound exposed. The bassinet I’d watched her choose with ridiculous attention still sat where she left it, white and perfect. The blanket I’d folded the night before the hospital—soft pink, embroidered with a little crown—lay folded and untouched like evidence of a life paused. I imagined her tiny fist curling around my finger in that bassinet. Instead I’d thrown that same bassinet across the room the night they took her. I’d felt like I’d torn the house apart on purpose; grief makes you violent in the smallest of ways.

The bedroom had been redecorated like an altar. I’d done most of it in fits, buying gear, installing locks, overcompensating for every security breach I could imagine. When Esmé stepped into the room and froze, I recognized the way her shoulders closed inwards—the hollow a mother carries when the person inside her doesn’t return.

She cried then, small, helpless sounds that I’d never meant to hear from her. She tried to be strong for me and the men and the company, and that cracked in the private quiet of our room. I bent down, kissed her temple, and guided her toward the bathroom.

She stood over the sink and stared at herself. I turned the shower to what she always called the perfect temperature. Watching her undress was like watching the world fold into a single, sanctified problem—a wound that existed between need and anger.

She let me help her. She moved like a machine and then, suddenly, like a woman remembering her own skin. I peeled off her shirt and bra and rolled her leggings down with careful, quick hands. She was still healing—pale along the incision—but the red line there was a map to fury. I could not let anything strip off her power.

She stepped into the shower and straightened under the water, shoulders easing like someone surrendering to a hot sun. I stood back and watched for a long minute—the water picking up her hair’s dark shine, tracing the scar that would never fully disappear.

Twenty minutes later she lay in a ball on our side of the bed. I changed from wet clothes into shorts. I could shower later. I tucked the blanket up around her and slid my arm around her waist, pulling her close. Her breath stuttered for a while, then slowed. She’d been silent since we came in—no cursing, no commands, no stone-cold intimidation—only this hollow, draining quiet. It brutalized me.

I whispered nonsense into the crook of her neck until she fell into a ragged sleep. Then, I eased my hand away and stole into the bathroom for my own shower. The water cut a line across my tiredness. Even so, I couldn’t sleep without washing the day off. I let the hot water run until my muscles softened and the knot behind my jaw unrolled.

I slid back into bed the way a man returns to a battlefield after a raid—expectant, sleepless, ready. I spooned into Esmé’s back and let exhaustion swallow me.

—

I woke with my neck screaming from sleep. Esmé’s side of the bed was empty; the door to the bathroom stood open. As if she’d reclaimed the day before the sun rose. I shoved the covers off and padded down the hall, teeth still grinding sleep from my mouth, thoughts a thin string of worry tied around my ribs.

She wasn’t in the shower. The scent of her shampoo lingered, but the tiles were cold. I walked toward the office with a bounce of relief tucked behind my step—some small, idiotic hope that maybe she’d laughed in her sleep, that the world had corrected itself overnight.

I leaned against the office doorframe and watched her.

She was dressed like the woman who had once made every door in the room part with her like water parts rock. Forest-green silk, tucked into a black pencil skirt. Heels beside the desk, but for now she was bare-footed and sharp. The blouse was pulled up just enough to cradle a pump at her breast—mechanical and intimate all at once. Four men—Javier and three others—stood in front of her, their postures rigid and silently patient. I’d not noticed them when I walked in. I didn’t like how they didn’t move when I entered; I didn’t like the way their eyes flicked to me and then down, like supplicants who’d been taught fear.

“Out.” My voice wasn’t a request. It was a door slamming in a hallway. The four men, heads bowed, pivoted and left with the automatic precision of trained soldiers. They closed the door behind them without fanfare.

I stepped inside and felt the office shrink to just Esmé and me.

“What the f**k do you think you are doing?” I demanded, closing the space between us, heavy steps like a judge walking in.

She looked down at the pump between her breasts and back up at me, eyes steady. “I think this is called pumping,” she said as if educating a child.

“I know what it is,” I snapped. “My question is why are you doing it in front of four of our men? Do you want to be responsible for their deaths?” I pointed to the door where the men had gone. Heat rose in my chest the size of an iron skillet. I was a proud man, and proud people are stupid when they’re afraid.

“They’re professionals,” she said, voice low. “And I don’t need the theater of privacy to feed my child.”

“You put our men at risk.” My jaw worked. “If any of them die because they were watching you pump, I will make someone pay.

Right now I’m two seconds away from ripping heads off.”

Her stare was unblinking. “Then next time you’ll put a bullet between their eyes. I do not care. If my daughter needs me, I will pump in front of anyone.”

There was something absurd and beautiful about how she chose defiance over delicacy. She is a queen who refuses to be turned into a porcelain doll.

I felt heat spike behind my ribs and not just from the fight. I left the office, slammed the door, and walked down the hall like a man with teeth grinding dangerously. My anger wasn’t just about the men watching. It was about being helpless. It was about the choke in my throat that always comes when I imagine what those strangers might be doing to my daughter.

I walked the property once—checked the perimeter sensors, spoke into radios, barked a few orders. My men liked me better when I was decisive. The estate hummed like an animal: guards, lights, whispered watch rotations. I told three teams to double up, to sweep known Perros spots, to check shipping manifests for unmarked vans. I told Javier to break the day into pieces he could eat and to call me the second anything snapped into place.

By the time I returned home—one hand running through hair that refused to behave—I felt hollowed and full at the same time. I wasn’t tired in the peace-sleep way. I was tired in the drilling-to-bone way.

Esmé sat alone at the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking. She had that look—the calculating, cold look that meant she was turning pain into plan.

“You okay?” I asked.

She shrugged and didn’t meet my eyes. “I’m thinking,” she said.

“You scare me sometimes,” I said, because it’s the truth and because sometimes truths cut cleaner than anger. “Not because you’re dangerous—because you are. Because what you’re willing to do to get back our daughter terrifies me.”

She reached, took my hand, and squeezed. “You married me anyway.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

And I would do it again. Ten thousand times.

We didn’t say much after that. Words are silly things compared to the work at hand. The whole family was assembling, quietly and efficiently. Men came in and out with lists, with surveillance data, with tracking points. We were a machine tuning to one single, terrible pitch.

At dusk we gathered again in the war room. Screens lit the space like a cathedral. Javier brought new files, a new image with the tattoo that had caught Esmé’s eye. A small triangle of dots on a wrist. We traced contacts, mapped routes, and plotted the smallest of triggers.

When the first lead moved—just a whisper of drainage in the noise—I felt the coil inside me unwind. It was a start. A piece that might become a line.

Esmé stood then, her posture easing into that terrible, regal thing she does when the hunt arrives. “Ready the trucks,” she said. “Call

Leo. Patch in our people in Miami and Honduras. No one knows yet; keep it tight. We move tonight.”

My chest contracted with something like prayer and fury. I looked at her—at the woman bent over monitors, pumping between plans, picking up crumbs of technology like hand grenades—and I felt again, in an ugly, pure way, why I’d married the capo. She is a queen of ruin, and I—knowing the music of her hands—set myself to be her blade.

“Let’s bring them home,” I said.

She nodded, and when she smiled it was not because she was happy. It was because she had decided, and in that decision there was no turning back.

We would not sleep. Not tonight. Not until Aaliyah’s tiny hands were back in our house and Thomas was standing at my right hand again.

The sound of the estate humming around us turned from background to battle drum. We had a war to begin.