Chapter 6
One year later, Vale House — no, my own house, the one that used to feel like a fortress rather than a home — sounded different.
It sounded like laughter that didn’t stop when I walked through the door.
Claire ran to me most evenings now, steady on both legs, her limp nearly invisible unless you knew exactly what to look for. Josie usually beat her to the front hall by half a second, the two of them tangled together in a hug I no longer took for granted.
The Castellano network never fully recovered from that night. Vincent spent the following year buried in legal battles I made certain never touched my daughters again. I stepped back from parts of my world I once thought were untouchable, restructuring the business into something that no longer required looking over my shoulder every time my girls left the house.
It cost me power.
It cost me allies who valued fear over loyalty.
I didn’t miss either.
Hannah stayed.
Not as a maid. Not even, eventually, as only Claire’s therapist.
She opened a small pediatric rehabilitation practice six blocks from the house, funded quietly, on her insistence, as a loan she was paying back rather than a gift she hadn’t earned. Claire and Josie both spent afternoons there now, not out of necessity, but because Hannah had become someone neither girl could imagine their week without.
Neither could I.
On the one-year anniversary of the night Vincent’s men breached the east wall, Hannah and I sat on the porch steps long after the girls had fallen asleep, the quiet between us comfortable instead of heavy for the first time in longer than either of us could measure.
“I used to think love was a weakness in my world,” I admitted. “Something men like me couldn’t afford.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it might be the only thing worth protecting all of this for.”
Hannah smiled, tired and real. “Elliot would have liked you, eventually. Once he got past everything you represented.”
“I hope I could have earned that.”
“You’re earning it every day. Just maybe not from him.”
I found her hand in the dark and didn’t let go.
Somewhere upstairs, two little girls slept soundly, safe not because of the walls I’d built around them, but because of the people who finally stood inside those walls with them, unwilling to let fear write the ending anymore.
I built an empire believing power was the only language people respected.
It took a maid with a paper moon and a broken heart of her own to teach me the only language that ever truly mattered was showing up.
Have you ever had someone outside your family show you what love was supposed to look like, when the people closest to you couldn’t? What would you have done in Dominic’s place?
