His lungs stopped.
He had seen that ring in exactly one place, on exactly one hand, at exactly one moment in his life. Four years earlier, at Hinsdale Memorial, he’d sat beside a hospital bed for six hours while the woman who raised him said goodbye to the world. He’d slid that ring onto her finger himself in the funeral home, pressed his lips to her forehead, watched two men lower the casket lid. He had stood at the graveside in the October rain and watched them lower it into the ground.
That ring was in the earth. It was categorically impossible for it to be on this child’s finger, on this street, in this storm.
Alessio picked up both girls without a word, one in each arm, carried them to the car, and closed the door against the wind.
“Drive,” he told Theo. His voice betrayed nothing. It never did.
As the car moved through the empty white streets, the smaller girl sat in his lap, studying him with the same focused intensity he brought to classified documents. Then she reached up, her small warm hand finding the scar on his jaw — the one from a warehouse knife fight when he was nineteen, a story only three living people knew.
Her touch wasn’t exploratory. It was deliberate. The touch of a child confirming something she’d been told.
“Mama said you had a sad face,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened beneath her fingers. “What’s your mama’s name?”
She blinked, her gray eyes — his eyes — holding his without wavering. “If we ever got lost, we should find the man with the wolf ring.” She looked down at the heavy platinum signet on his right hand, the crowned wolf of the Ferro syndicate, teeth bared, crown intact. She nodded once, with the grave satisfaction of a small child completing an important mission.
“We found you.”
PART 2