Chapter 1 - The Little Girl Who Called Me FamilyMy name is Dante Romano.
Men lowered their voices when they spoke it.
Judges disappeared after refusing my offers, gang leaders surrendered entire districts rather than face me, and even the police avoided looking directly into my car.
Yet every afternoon at four, I ordered my driver to stop beside a narrow alley in the poorest part of the city.
That was where I met Lily.
She was eight years old, thin as a reed, with worn sneakers and a brown coat several sizes too large.
While other children played with toys, Lily gathered plastic bottles from trash bins and sold them to help her sick mother pay the rent.
The first time she saw me, she stared at my black SUV and frowned.
“Are you a bad man?”
My guards reached for their weapons, but I raised one hand.
“What makes you think that?”
She pointed at my tattoos, then at the three armed men behind me.
“Good men don’t need that many people protecting them.”
I almost laughed.
No one had spoken to me so honestly in years.
The next day, I returned with food.
Lily refused to take it until I sat beside her on the wet pavement and shared it with her.
After that, visiting her became a habit.
She showed me her drawings while mechanics worked behind us.
I listened as she talked about school, her mother’s illness, and the father she had never met.
In return, she asked questions no adult dared ask.
“Do you have a family?”
“I did.”
“What happened to them?”
I looked away.
When I was six, armed men attacked our home in Sicily.
My father pushed me through a cellar window while my mother held my baby sister against her chest.
“Run, Dante!” she screamed.
“Don’t look back!”
I ran until my feet bled.
By sunrise, my house was burning, my family had vanished, and I was alone in a foreign city with nothing but my father’s ring in my pocket.
I slept beneath bridges.
I stole bread.
I fought older boys for places near warm vents during winter.
By sixteen, I worked for smugglers.
By twenty-five, I controlled them.
By forty, I had become the man who frightened the monsters that once frightened me.
But I never found my mother or sister.
“I think they’re still looking for you,” Lily whispered.
I forced a smile.
“After thirty years?”
“Family doesn’t stop looking.”
Before I could answer, two black vans blocked both ends of the alley.
My guards drew their guns.
Masked men poured from the vehicles.
“Take the girl alive!”
“Kill Romano!”
Bullets shattered the repair shop windows.
I pulled Lily behind me.
Then her oversized coat tore at the collar.
A silver pendant fell against her chest.
My breath stopped.
It carried the Romano family crest.
Inside it was a faded photograph of my mother holding a baby girl.
“Where did you get that?”
Lily stared at me in terror.
“My mother gave it to me,” she cried.
“She said it belonged to her brother, Dante.”
For thirty years, I had believed my family was dead.
May you like
Now an eight-year-old girl was standing in front of me wearing proof that one of them might have survived.
And someone was willing to kill an entire alley just to make sure I never discovered the truth.
Related Stories
