"It might," my voice was low. "It might also make him exile the people who gave him shelter. He's not as blind as you think."
Her eyes darted to the boy, then to me, then back again. In that tiny flicker I saw the math she'd been doing in her head, what she could trade, how much time she had left, what price the world might offer for a lie. I could see what years of needle tracks and throttled promises had done to her face.
The child's pulse fluttered against my palm when Marc handed him to me for a second, and I'd seen the lab reports in Marcello's folder.
Two bastards. A mother who feeds her poison to a child makes every broken thing she touches complicit.
"Get him warm," I told Marc, and he bundled the boy in a blanket.
The woman shrieked different sounds shifting throu
