Chapter 1 - The Ash and The Echo.
.The nursery fell into a suffocating silence.
The warm chandelier above seemed to flicker as Lorenzo Rossi stood in the doorway with a black pistol lowered toward the floor.
Hunter Higgins sat frozen in the wooden rocking chair with Leo tucked against her chest and a small bottle with a pale blue rim resting against his lips.
The baby swallowed again.
It was barely audible.
Yet to Lorenzo it sounded louder than the Atlantic crashing against the cliffs below his estate.
For fourteen days, his son had turned away from every bottle placed near him.
For fourteen days, specialists had spoken in careful voices about declining weight, fragile veins, and time running out.
Now Leo was drinking from the hands of a maid Lorenzo had never spoken to.
“Do not stop,” Lorenzo said.
His voice was low, but the command came out broken around the edges.
Hunter looked at him without moving the bottle.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
The private night nurse, Celia Ward, stood beside the crib with her face drained of color.
“Mr. Rossi, she entered without authorization.”
Lorenzo’s eyes never left his son.
“So did you fall asleep without authorization?”
Celia said nothing.
Hunter felt Leo pause beneath the blanket.
Her stomach tightened.
She adjusted the bottle by a fraction and whispered to him.
“You’re okay, little man.”
Leo began drinking again.
Lorenzo crossed the room slowly.
The dangerous certainty everyone feared in him had vanished, replaced by the careful movements of a man approaching something sacred and breakable.
“How much?” he asked.
Hunter glanced at the markings.
“Almost an ounce.”
Lorenzo closed his eyes for one second.
Hunter saw his throat tighten.
Dr. Halloran entered behind two guards and stopped so abruptly that one nearly walked into him.
“That is not possible,” the doctor said.
Hunter looked up.
“You should probably stop saying that while he’s doing it.”
Halloran stepped closer and checked Leo’s pulse monitor.
The numbers were stronger than they had been an hour earlier.
He reached for the bottle.
Leo immediately turned his face away.
Hunter pulled it back before the doctor could touch him.
“Slow down.”
Halloran stared at her as if a maid had just corrected a surgeon in his own operating room.
Lorenzo noticed.
“What did you do differently?” he asked.
Hunter hesitated.
She had spent the last three weeks trying not to speak about Lily because saying her daughter’s name made the hospital room return in perfect detail.
“I held him first.”
Lorenzo frowned.
“And?”
“I warmed the bottle in my hands.”
She looked down at Leo.
“I didn’t make him fight me.”
The answer seemed too simple for a room containing equipment worth more than Hunter’s apartment building.
Halloran shook his head.
“That cannot explain this degree of feeding refusal.”
“Then maybe you should explain why the nurse had wine beside her chair,” Hunter replied.
Celia stiffened.
Lorenzo finally looked at her.
His expression became cold again.
“Leave.”
“Mr. Rossi, I can—”
“Now.”
Celia rushed out.
Leo finished the ounce and released the bottle with a faint sigh.
Hunter held him upright against her shoulder.
A tiny burp escaped him.
For the first time in two months, Lorenzo Rossi laughed.
It was only one breath of sound.
Then his face changed.
He stared at the bottle on Hunter’s lap.
The formula inside was not from the tray beside the crib.
“Where did that bottle come from?” he asked.
Hunter followed his gaze.
“It was already on the warming table.”
Halloran turned toward the medical cart.
His expression tightened.
“There wasn’t supposed to be a bottle there tonight.”
Lorenzo slowly lifted his eyes toward the open nursery door.
May you like
Someone had prepared Leo’s feeding before Hunter arrived.
And no one in the room knew who.
