“What are you doing here?”
“Checking if the correction worked.”
For a second Maya didn’t speak. Then she glanced toward Lily Rose and back. Her eyes had the glazed brightness of someone holding together too many hours with no sleep.
“They approved the dose,” she said. “Someone covered the balance.”
“Good.”
The word came out harsher than he intended.
Maya studied him. “Was it you?”
Dante did not answer right away.
Inside the crib, Lily stirred, opened enormous dark eyes, and stared at the stranger in the doorway with solemn caution. Dante had stared down senators with less discomfort than he felt under that child’s gaze.
“Mama,” Lily whispered, her voice thin from treatment. “Who’s dat?”
Maya softened instantly, every line in her body changing direction. “That’s Mr. Dante. He helped us today.”
Lily considered this. Then, with the brutal honesty available only to the very young, she said, “He looks mad.”
A sound escaped Maya that was almost a laugh.
Dante stepped closer to the crib. “I usually do.”
Lily kept staring. “You got candy?”
“No.”
Her face fell.
“But,” Dante said, reaching into the pocket of his coat and pulling out the only remotely harmless object he carried, “I have a silver coin.”
He held it between two fingers. Old habit. His father had taught him to roll coins across knuckles when patience was required. Lily’s eyes widened. Dante let the coin vanish into his palm, then reappear from behind the rabbit’s ear.
Lily gasped.
For the first time in years, perhaps decades, Dante felt something dangerously close to warmth move through him before analysis could stop it.
Maya saw it happen. That was the problem.
After the nurse came and went, after Lily dozed again under the slow pulse of medication, Maya stepped into the hallway with him.
“Why are you really doing this?” she asked.
“Because your daughter needs treatment.”
“That’s not a reason. Rich people pay bills every day and still sleep fine. Men with your name don’t just wake up kind.”
Dante’s mouth tilted without humor. “Who said anything about kind?”
“Then honest.”
He looked at the floor, then at her.
“One of my companies,” he said, “or rather one of the companies buried underneath my companies, has been profiting from shortages tied to your daughter’s medication.”
The color left her face.
“I didn’t know until last night. Now I do.”
She stared at him as though the hallway had shifted beneath her feet.
“So all of this,” she said slowly, “the reason I begged my mother for money, the reason they almost withheld my daughter’s dose, the reason I’ve been choosing between rent and breathing treatments… that was because someone in your world wanted a bigger margin?”
“Yes.”
The word sat between them, ugly and absolute.
Maya folded her arms over herself. “And I’m supposed to trust you to fix it?”
“No,” Dante said. “Trust is expensive. I haven’t earned it.”
A long silence followed.
At last she asked, “Then what are you asking from me?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not how men like you work.”
He met her gaze. “Maybe that’s the part I’m trying to correct too.”
Reed called an hour later.
“We have movement,” he said. “Moretti tried to transfer the remaining pediatric stock from Pier Forty-Seven to a private buyer in Jersey. Franco stalled him, but not for long. Also, and you’re going to hate this, somebody tipped him off that you visited St. Catherine’s.”
Dante went still.
“How.”
“Unknown. But if Moretti thinks the maid is the reason you started digging, she could become leverage.”
Dante turned immediately toward Maya’s room.
Too late.
The crib was empty.
Not abandoned. Moved. The nurse station had taken Lily for imaging. Maya had gone with the transport team. But terror had already entered his bloodstream, and once there, it sharpened everything.
He sent two men to the radiology floor and called Reed back. “Lock down the hospital entrances with private security. Quietly. No uniforms that say Ferraro.”
“That’ll look bad.”
“It will look worse if a scared accountant with hired muscle decides to solve his problem with a child.”
The confrontation came before sunset.
Moretti had always mistaken Dante’s restraint for softness in areas he deemed “non-core.” Hospitals, subsidies, family cases. Numbers too small to attract his attention. That had been the greed talking, and greed always eventually confused itself for intelligence.
