Saving The Capo's Heir

One

Esmé

Pain sat like a hot coal behind my ribs, but I kept my face smooth. My body wanted to fold in on itself; my mind wanted to rip whoever did this to pieces. Mason hovered at the foot of the bed, jaw locked, hands trembling as if he might strangle the world for daring to hurt our daughter.

“Please, Mason,” Mom said softly, voice small and raw. “You need to eat. Shower. You can’t stay here breathing smoke.”

He didn’t look like the kind of man who ever slept without a plan. He looked like a man who had fallen into an ocean and kept swimming anyway. He kissed Aaliyah’s tiny fingers like they were the only compass left.

“I’ll be five,” he said to me. “I’m coming right back.”

He left with one hard look through the glass that said he didn’t trust the hospital with a toe. I watched him go because I needed to believe he would come back. It was an indulgence. A lie.

The second his footsteps faded, I pressed the call button. The ache in my abdomen throbbed in time with the lights blinking from the nurse’s station. I tasted iron on my tongue and tried to focus on Aaliyah’s tiny face. Babies are constant; babies remind you why you keep sharp edges tucked away. But I felt the edges unraveling.

A dull thud sounded in the hallway. Someone heavier than a standard hospital cart hit the wall. A tray clattered. I frowned at the door before it slid open and a nurse walked in.

“Hello. I’m Kai. I’ll be with you until midnight,” she said, writing her name on the board with a practiced hand. Her gaze snapped to Aaliyah’s bassinet and lingered like a map reader circling the treasure.

I did not like the way she looked at my daughter. Not curiosity. Calculation.

“I’m having a lot of pain,” I said. “Tylenol would help.”

Kai’s smile thinned. “We’ll do something stronger through your IV. It’ll work faster.”

She returned with a syringe and a small vial. My gut tightened. Hospital protocols, guards outside—what could possibly go wrong?

The soft lie of safety can be so loud when you’re a leader used to violence. I should have known better. Still, you make small compromises when the people you love need calm.

“Mom, be careful,” I mouthed.

But she was already watching with the same stunned worry that had made her hands tremble when she held me the night I decided to take the throne.

Kai wiped my IV port and pushed the syringe. The world smudged at the edges in seconds. My muscles turned to lead.

And then the horror.

Mom’s voice rose like a ripped wire. “What is—” followed by a sound that could only be called a scream when it was full throttle and animal. Glass shattered somewhere down the hall. Boots on linoleum—fast, coordinated. Aaliyah wailed.

My vision stuttered in and out. The air filled with shouts in voices that didn’t belong to our people. Men dressed in scrubs and coats moved like predators with surgical precision.

No.

Our guards went down first — executed with clinical efficiency. Not random bullets. Targets. A plan.

My mother moved like a reflex, scooping Aaliyah into her chest. She was up, blocking like a shield. Someone hit her across the face with a gun butt. She fell into the recliner, face a mask of beaten fury. My mother, who had carried centuries of family pride in the way she folded her hands, now lay broken and stunned.

I tried to scream. My throat was dry. My body would not move.

Kai stood above me, expression empty. No mercy. No hesitation.

“You were careless,” she said quietly. “You never should have had her.”

The gun flashed. Pain exploded in my stomach. Fire raced through my insides. I dropped from the bed, the world tilting like a cheap movie set. Blood pooled warm beneath me. I couldn’t see the crib. I couldn’t hear anything but the roaring thunder of pain in my bones.

Boots thumped closer. The cry of my baby thinned and then—then a hand covered my mouth to stifle the sound. My resistance dissolved like paper on a flame.

Blackness took me.

Taste. Heat. A voice like a blade softened by a whisper.

“Wake up, baby girl. Come on. Don’t you— don’t you go on me.”

Mason’s mouth on mine like an anchor. He was crying: quiet, held-back sobs that shook through his chest. He smelled like sweat and cheap cologne and a man who had spent the last seven days living on adrenalin and pity.

I pushed for air. My tongue felt too big for my mouth, the dryness of the void clinging to everything.

“Aaliyah,” I croaked. The word tipped out of me like a prayer or a curse.

Mason went still. Every line in his face tightened as if a rope had been pulled under his skin. “I—I’m so sorry,” he managed. His voice sounded broken, not the cracked veneer of a leader but the raw fracture of a man who had married into a life he never truly understood. He loved our child with a fierceness that had once intimidated me with its tenderness. That love was a weakness my enemies had exploited—and willing weapon they had underestimated.

I dredged for memory: the syringe, the mistake in trusting someone in scrubs, Thomas shouting into the corridor. Blasts of light—blood—glass.

“Tell me,” I rasped. “Tell me what happened. Where is she?”

Mason’s lips trembled. “They took her.”

Taken. The word landed like a shiv. Everything else tunneled into a single point of cold white heat. I shoved my feet to the floor despite the acid flare ripping through me. My legs wanted to fold. My hands shook so hard the IV tape fluttered.

“Mrs. Walker—Esmé—” the doctor said, moving closer. He’d been competent and steady before; now he wore the pallor of someone who had seen a line-crossing.

“Shove your recommendation up your ass.” I spat the words like bile. “They took my daughter and you want me to sit here and rest? Do you hear me? Rest?”

Mason said it quietly, like naming a corpse. “One week.”

My lungs burned. One week. Seven days of being trapped inside a body that couldn’t fight. Seven days while my bloodline was handed off like contraband. Seven days of seizure and terror.

“One week? One week?” I repeated, each syllable a hammer. The room shifted—walls and faces and the grey fluorescent lights. I wanted violence. I wanted blood. I wanted every throat cut until the world tasted clean again.

“How many men?” I asked. My voice had the flat danger of a woman who rules families, not a shaken mother pleading in a nursery.

This was the part of me I’d kept hidden: the cold ledger of a capo who counted losses like truth.

Mason swallowed. His fingers were bruised white around the edge of my mattress. “Five at the hospital. Ten at the house.” He looked as if the numbers themselves were a knife twisting.

Fifteen lives. Fifteen funerals. Fifteen loud emptinesses.

“Thomas?” My voice softened for that name, not from tenderness but from necessity. Thomas had been at my shoulder for years—second-in-command, my left hand in every operation. He was the one who made sure the cartel’s heartbeat never skipped. Without him, the family would have a hole big enough for vultures.

Mason’s face closed. “They took him too. He fought—God, he fought. But they drugged him and dragged him away.”

The knife dug in deeper. Thomas taken meant the chain of command was shredded. Our enemies had not simply attacked our family; they’d attempted to dismantle it. Maybe they’d hoped with our heir gone and our second-in-command snatched, the cartel would splinter.

They didn’t understand us. They didn’t understand me.

My mother—always practical, always the quiet strength of our kind—sat with eyes wild and empty. “She keeps saying she should have moved faster,” Mason murmured. “She blames herself.”

Guilt is a dangerous thing in a family of killers; it eats at the backbone until the spine is brittle. I would not let it eat her.

I wiped my hand across my mouth and tasted metal; the bandage around my midsection was sticky with old blood. The wound throbbed a steady, insistent drum. That wound would scar and become another map line on a body that would be remembered.

I looked Mason in the eyes. He had married into my life, into my throne. He had not been raised to carry it, but he carried it now with bruised hands and a heart that had split for our child. He was not the capo. He was the man who would bleed for our daughter because he loved her in the simplest, purest way. That love made him both dangerous and human.

“Listen to me,” I said, voice low and steady the way only rulers use. “I want everything. Every camera. Every phone ping. Every car plate. Find the ones who bought the masks. Find the van. Find the clinic that sponsored the fake nurses.”

His jaw clenched. “We will.”

“And when we find them,” I continued, a smile that had no warmth carving my face, “they will not be lucky enough to die quick.”

His fingers found my wrist, hard and trembling. His mouth hovered over mine, for an instant the man I loved and the monster we required blinked into one. “We’ll tear them apart,” he whispered.

We would. We had to. This was the code: blood for blood, lineage preserved by violence. They had stolen the Capo’s heir—the one who carried the bloodline that meant power, legacy, and the future of everything I had built. That was not a theft. That was a declaration of war.

I felt something inside me snap: not a surrender, but a shift.

“I’m not the only monster in this family anymore, Mason.” My voice was soft. It did not betray the teeth beneath it.

He looked at me then with the hungry, awed terror of a man watching a volcano light. “Good,” he said. “Because I want to watch you burn the world.”

They had no idea who had been born to rule them.

They were about to find out.