His Secret Heirs

Chapter Three

Vin’s POV

Marco delivered the file himself, which told me something about how seriously he'd taken my instructions to keep this quiet. He set the folder on my desk without a word, and I didn't open it for a long moment, my hand resting flat against the cover; I could somehow prepare myself for what was inside by sheer force of will.

I'd built an empire on the principle of never hesitating. I hesitated now.

When I finally opened it, the details were exactly as clinical as I'd asked for and somehow still managed to undo me completely. Sienna Cole, twenty-nine. Registered nurse, St. Adeline's Medical Center, cardiac and general admissions floor. Address in the Bronx, a walk-up on a block I had my people quietly confirm was safe, unremarkable, ordinary in every way that mattered. No criminal record. No red flags. A cousin, Reyna, who watched the twins during her shifts. A mother upstate she called every Sunday, according to the phone records I'd told myself I wasn't going to ask for and asked for anyway.

Two children. Gio and Rosalie. Three years old. Born eight months after a wedding I'd almost skipped.

I sat with that file open in front of me for the better part of an hour, the city going gold and then grey outside my window as the afternoon burned down into evening, and I did not move to act on a single piece of information in it.

This surprised me more than I wanted to admit.

I am not a patient man by nature. Patience is a skill I built, deliberately, the way I built everything else about myself after my father died because impatience gets you killed in this business, gets your men killed, gets deals burned that took years to construct. But this wasn't a deal. This wasn't territory or leverage or a rival who needed to understand the cost of crossing me.

This was two children who existed because of one night I'd spent three years trying, badly, not to think about.

"You're quiet," Marco said, from the doorway, in the tone of a man who'd worked for me long enough to know when quiet meant something worth worrying about.

"I'm thinking."

"About the nurse?"

I didn't answer that, which was answer enough. Marco had the good sense not to push.

"What's the play, boss?"

It was a fair question. I'd told him, days ago, that I intended to find a way into her life without revealing what I knew a plan I still believed in, still intended to execute. But sitting there with her file open in front of me, I found myself circling a harder truth than I'd expected: that I did not actually know, yet, what kind of man I wanted to be when I finally stood in front of her again.

The version of me that ran this city would walk into that hospital tomorrow, check himself into whatever bed got him closest to her, and start executing a plan with the same cold precision I brought to every other objective I'd ever set myself. That version was already halfway drafted in my head: a manufactured cardiac complaint, a private room, an excuse to be near her that wouldn't raise questions from anyone watching either of us too closely.

But some other, quieter part of me a part I didn't examine often, because examining it usually cost me something wanted, for once, to do this right. Slowly. Carefully. Not as a Don closing in on an asset, but as a man who'd made a mistake three years ago and finally had a chance to not make it twice.

"Nothing yet," I told Marco, closing the file. "We watch. That's all, for now."

"Watch how close?"

"Close enough to know she's safe. Not close enough that she ever notices." I looked up at him, and something in my voice must have carried more weight than I intended, because Marco's expression shifted to surprise, maybe, or the particular unease of a man realizing his boss was navigating something he'd never seen him navigate before. "No one approaches her. No one so much as speaks to her. I want to know her routine, her patterns, whether she's safe walking home at night. Nothing more."

"And the kids?"

My jaw tightened. "The same. From a distance."

Marco nodded slowly, filing the order away without argument, though I could see the question sitting behind his eyes anyway: why are you being careful with this one, when you've never been careful with anything in your life?

I didn't have an answer I was ready to give him. I wasn't entirely sure I had one for myself.

I stood at my window long after he'd gone, looking down at a city I controlled more of than most men would ever know, and thought about a woman in a green dress who'd laughed at something a bartender said three years ago and undone, in the space of one night, every careful wall I'd spent my adult life constructing.

I would go slowly this time. I would not repeat the mistake of leaving before she woke.

But I would not rush this either, not the way I rushed everything else in my life, because everything else in my life was territory to be claimed and enemies to be handled, and she was neither of those things.

She was, I was beginning to understand with a kind of quiet dread, something far more dangerous than anything I usually let close to me.

She was a woman I could actually lose, if I got this wrong.

And for the first time in longer than I could remember, that possibility not violence, not betrayal, not the usual currency of threats I dealt in was the thing that scared me.