His Secret Heirs

Chapter Two

Vin’s POV

I have built my life on the principle that nothing happens by accident.

Every deal I make, every man I place, every street corner that quietly answers to me instead of the city none of it is chance. Chance is a luxury for people who don't understand how the world actually works. I understood it by the time I was nineteen, standing over my father's casket, watching men twice my age decide in real time whether I was worth following or worth killing.

I chose to make them follow me. That wasn't luck either.

So when Marco called me at four-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon to tell me two of my men had picked up a lost kid at some street fair in the Bronx a fair with zero connection to any business of mine, a neighborhood I had no reason to have eyes in that day except that I'd sent a crew to quietly surveil a warehouse three blocks over I should have told him to hand the boy to the nearest cop and forget it.

I didn't.

"Send me the photo," I said instead.

There was a pause on the line, the kind of pause my men have learned means don't ask, just do it. A minute later my phone buzzed.

I've been in this business long enough to have seen every kind of horror a phone screen can deliver. Men who owed me money, missing fingers. Rivals who thought they could take territory that wasn't theirs, lessons taught in ways I don't examine too closely anymore. I thought I was unshockable.

I was wrong.

The boy in the photograph had my mother's chin. My own eyes, down to the exact shade of grey-green my father used to say looked like a storm deciding whether to break. He had a stubborn set to his small jaw that I recognized because I saw it in the mirror every single morning of my adult life.

I sat behind my desk in an office forty floors above a city I'd spent a decade learning to control, and for the first time since I was nineteen years old, I felt something close the walls in around me.

Three years.

I did the math before I'd even consciously decided to. Three years since a wedding I almost hadn't attended my cousin's, upstate, a favor to my mother more than anything I actually wanted to do. Three years since I'd stood at an open bar making conversation I didn't care about, half a second from leaving, when a woman in a green dress had laughed at something the bartender said, and I'd forgotten, for the length of that laugh, every single thing I usually keep locked down.

I didn't get her name until an hour later. Sienna. I remember thinking it suited her, soft and warm, nothing like the world I came from.

I remember leaving before dawn, the way I always did, the way I'd trained myself to with anyone who got too close, because closeness is a liability in my line of work and I did not have room in my life for liabilities.

I remember, if I'm being honest with myself, which I rarely allow thinking about her more than once in the years since. More than I should have. More than made sense for one night with a stranger whose last name I'd never even asked.

I hadn't looked for her. That had been deliberate. A rule, like every other rule I live by.

Apparently the universe didn't care about my rules.

"Marco." My voice came out level. It always does, even now, even when nothing inside me feels level at all. "I want everything on the mother. Address, employer, family. Quietly. Nobody touches her, nobody approaches her, nobody so much as looks at her twice. You understand me?"

"Understood, boss." A beat. "You want me to run it through legal, get a formal—"

"I said quietly, Marco."

I didn't need lawyers. I didn't need a paper trail. What I needed what I was already, coldly, methodically building in the back of my mind before I'd even stood up from my desk was a plan.

Because here is the thing about me that the men who work for me understand and the women who've tried to get close to me eventually learn the hard way: I do not lose what's mine. I have never once, in my entire life, let something I wanted slip through my hands without a fight.

And whatever this woman had built for herself in the Bronx, whatever life she thought was hers alone, whatever reason she'd had for never once trying to find me, none of that mattered anymore.

She had my son's face memorized. My daughter's, too, if the second name Marco mentioned in passing was any indication a twin, a girl, Rosalie- and something in my chest cracked open a second time at that.

Two of them. She'd raised two of my children alone in a walk-up in the Bronx while I sat in a penthouse pretending I'd never wondered what happened to the woman in the green dress.

I stood at the window, looking down at a city that had never once told me no, and decided with the same cold clarity I brought to every decision that mattered.

I would not announce myself. Not yet. Announcing myself meant explanations, accusations, a confrontation I wasn't ready to survive with my composure intact, and worse, it meant exposure. The moment my world knew I had children, they became targets. I'd buried men for less leverage than two small hostages with my blood in their veins.

No. I would go slowly. Carefully. I would find a way into her life that didn't announce what I already knew, and I would watch, and I would learn everything about the world she'd built without me before I decided how or whether to tear it open.

I picked up my phone again.

"One more thing," I told Marco. "Find out where she works. St. Adeline's, you said?"

"Yeah, boss. She's a nurse there."

"Good." I looked back down at the photograph still glowing on my screen, my son's face, my own eyes staring back at me across three lost years. "I think it's time I had a reason to be a patient."