Chapter 3 - The Second Song
At three-fifty-five on the dot, the heavy oak doors at the end of the second-floor gallery swung open with a muffled hydraulic hiss.
Elena Whitmore was waiting. Dressed in navy scrubs, with her dark hair pulled back into a severe bun, she looked more like an operative than a caregiver. Her face was pale, shadowed by the exhaustion of weeks spent monitoring a man hovering between life and death.
“Clara,” she said quietly, stepping aside to let us pass. Her eyes immediately dropped to Mia, who was clutching my hand with one set of fingers while her other arm was wrapped tightly around Barnaby, her threadbare gray rabbit. “Hello, Mia.”
“Hi, nurse lady,” Mia said cheerfully. She wasn't frightened at all. Children have an uncanny lack of fear when they don't understand the concepts of mortality or violence. To Mia, this was just an adventure down a very shiny hallway.
The medical wing was freezing. The air was filtered, chilled to exactly sixty-six degrees to reduce metabolic demand and suppress potential brain swelling. The sound of the mechanical ventilator dominated the room—a steady, rhythmic *whoosh-click, whoosh-click* that sounded like the mechanical breathing of a caged beast.
In the center of the vast suite, elevated on an incline, was Lorenzo Moretti.
Seen in full light, he was an imposing, terrifying figure even in comatose stillness. He was broad-shouldered, his chest expanding artificially with each push from the ventilator. A dark shadow of stubble covered his jawline, contrasting sharply with the pallor of his skin. Thick, faded scars tracked across his collarbone and disappeared beneath the hospital gown—scars that had nothing to do with a car crash and everything to do with the violent world he commanded.
Mia didn't hesitate. Before I could hold her back, she tugged her hand free from mine and trotted toward the bed.
“Mia, wait—” I gasped, lunging forward, but Elena caught my forearm with a grip that was surprisingly firm.
“Wait,” Elena whispered, her eyes fixed on the telemetry monitors mounted to the wall above the bed. “Let her do what she did yesterday. Don't interfere.”
My chest seized with panic, but I stayed rooted to the floor.
Mia dragged the heavy vinyl armchair across the hardwood floor, the legs squeaking loudly in the quiet room. She scrambled up onto the seat, balancing precariously on her knees so she could lean over the chrome side rail.
“Wake up, mister,” Mia said softly, leaning in until her breath rustled the stray dark hairs on his forehead. “I brought Barnaby today. He has long ears.”
On the central monitor, Lorenzo’s heart rate read 52.
Elena picked up a digital tablet, her fingers hovering over the screen, recording baseline measurements. “EEG shows delta-wave predominance. No cortical spike activity,” she murmured under her breath.
Mia reached out. With total lack of hesitation, her small, warm fingers wrapped around Lorenzo’s right thumb. His skin was pale and cool, crisscrossed with thick veins and calluses from handling weapons.
“Your hands are still cold,” Mia chided gently, as if scolding a doll. She began rubbing his knuckles with her sleeve. “You have to wake up because the sun is out, and Mama says when the sun is out, we have to eat oatmeal.”
She paused, cocking her head to study his closed eyes. Then, in her sweet, off-key toddler voice, she began to sing:
*“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…*
*You make me happy when skies are gray…”*
I held my breath. The room seemed to expand, every sound amplified a thousand times over. The hum of the oxygen concentrator. The sterile scent of chlorhexidine. The tiny, fragile voice of my daughter echoing off marble baseboards.
*“You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…*
*Please don’t take my sunshine away…”*
Suddenly, the monitor let out a sharp, rhythmic chirp.
Elena gasped. Her fingers flew across the tablet. “Telemetry alert. Pulse is fifty-six... fifty-nine... sixty-two.”
“Is that bad?” I cried out, terrified that Mia was causing him to have a cardiac arrest. “Is he having a stroke?”
“No,” Elena whispered, her voice trembling with sheer disbelief. “Look at the neurological readout. The frontal lobe telemetry—it’s firing. He’s showing micro-arousals in the reticular activating system.”
As Mia reached the final line of the song, she leaned down and patted his cheek. “Wake up, mister.”
At that exact moment, Lorenzo Moretti’s right hand moved.
It wasn't a random twitch or an involuntary reflex. His thick fingers, scarred and heavy, slowly curled inward. They closed around Mia’s tiny wrist, resting there with gentle, deliberate pressure.
Mia didn't pull away. She just giggled. “Tickles.”
Before Elena or I could utter another word, the heavy double doors of the suite were shoved open with violent force.
“What the hell is going on in here?” a harsh, gravelly voice barked from the threshold.
I spun around, stepping instinctively between the bed and the door.
Standing in the entryway were two men. One was built like a brick wall, his hand resting conspicuously beneath his dark blazer where a shoulder holster bulged. The other man was younger than Lorenzo, perhaps thirty-two, with sharp, predatory cheekbones and eyes the color of bruised slate. He wore an immaculate charcoal suit, a black silk tie, and an expression that promised immediate violence.
Dante Moretti.
Lorenzo’s younger brother. The man who had been running the family's enforcement operations since the crash, and the man rumored to have executed three men in a Queens warehouse last week just to prove the family wasn't vulnerable.
Dante stepped into the room, his eyes scanning the scene before locking onto me, then onto Mia, who was still standing on the chair holding Lorenzo’s hand.
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“Who authorized this?” Dante demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous, lethal growl. He didn't look at Elena. He looked straight at me, his hand slipping into his coat. “And why is there a stranger’s kid touching my brother?”
***
