Hours before I was supposed to propose to another woman, four six-year-old boys walked into a restaurant bathroom looking so much like me that I forgot how to breathe

The brass handle of the restroom door was cold beneath my fingers, but the blood roaring in my ears burned like gasoline.

I stood in the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the dining room of L’Auberge, my back pressed against the wood-paneled wall, trying to force oxygen into lungs that had forgotten how to expand. Through the crack in the door, the ambient murmur of silverware clinking against porcelain and soft jazz drifted in. To anyone else, it was the sound of wealthy Bostonians enjoying an unremarkable Tuesday evening.

To me, it was white noise masking a bomb that had just detonated in my chest.

Four.

Four boys with my jawline. Four boys with the same deep-set, stormy gray eyes that stared back at me in the mirror every morning. Four boys who tilted their heads and reached their left hands behind their necks in the exact unconscious habit my father had beaten into me and I had never been able to break.

Six years old.

Six years ago, Elena Vance had walked out of my life without leaving so much as a note on the kitchen counter. I had spent eighteen months tearing the Eastern seaboard apart looking for her, unleashing private investigators, paying off harbor masters, threatening anyone who might have harbored her. My family had told me she took a payout. My uncle Salvatore had sworn she was an opportunist who realized the Moretti bloodline wasn't worth the danger. Eventually, the silence hardened into scar tissue, and the scar tissue turned into stone.

Until five seconds ago.

I pushed the door open and stepped out into the warmth of the main dining room.

My height usually parted crowds without effort. At six-foot-three, wearing a tailored midnight-navy Tom Ford suit with the Moretti crest stamped into the gold of my signet ring, people tended to clear a path. Tonight, I moved like a ghost through my own city. My gaze locked onto the far corner, near the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Commonwealth Avenue.

There she was.

She was kneeling on the parquet floor beside a round banquet table, her back turned to me. She wore an oversized cream-colored cashmere sweater that slipped slightly off one shoulder, her dark auburn hair gathered into a loose, messy twist held together by a wooden hair pin. It was the exact hairstyle she wore when she spent fourteen hours straight restoring Renaissance oil paintings in the loft we used to share on Newbury Street.

"Leo, please put your shoes back on," her voice floated across the dining room, breathless, gentle, and utterly unmistakable. "The train leaves at eight, and if we miss it, we have to wait two hours in the cold."

"Nico untied them," the first boy complained, crossing his arms over his chest. "He said soldiers don't wear laces inside."

"Soldiers don't get pneumonia either," Elena murmured, reaching down to knot the worn canvas sneaker.

I stopped three feet behind her.

The air left my body in a slow, ragged exhale. Up close, I could see the faint smudges of exhaustion beneath her skin, the slight tremor in her fingers as she worked the laces, the threadbare cuff of her sleeve. This woman had once slept wrapped in Egyptian cotton sheets in my penthouse, surrounded by guards paid to die for her smile. Now she was herding four identical boys in hand-me-down sweaters, checking a battered wrist watch that had a cracked glass face.

"Elena."

The name fell from my mouth like a bullet hitting glass.

The movement of her hands stopped instantly.

Every muscle in her back went rigid. For two agonizing seconds, she didn't breathe. She didn't turn around. She just froze, her head bowed over her son’s sneaker, as if she could convince herself that the voice behind her was a hallucination born from six years of running.

"Mommy?" the boy named Luca asked, blinking up at her. "Who is that?"

Elena slowly stood up.

She turned, keeping her body angled between me and the four children gathered at the table. When her eyes met mine, the color completely drained from her lips. She didn't gasp. She didn't scream. The terror that flooded her pale green eyes was far worse—it was the quiet, hollow dread of someone who had spent every waking second waiting for the executioner to finally knock on the door.

"Dominic," she whispered.

I stared at her. Time didn't heal wounds; it merely buried them under layers of callous and pride. Seeing her standing there, inches away, stripped every protective layer I had built over thirty-seven years down to raw nerve endings.

"Whose boys are they, Elena?" My voice was low, terrifyingly calm, vibrating with a rage so deep it threatened to crack the floorboards beneath us.

Elena swallowed hard, her hand reaching behind her back, instinctively pressing her four sons deeper into the booth. "They’re mine."

"Don't lie to me," I stepped forward.

The movement was subtle, but one of the boys—Leo, the eldest by demeanor—instantly scrambled to his feet on the leather seat, puffing out his small chest and glaring at me with eyes so identical to mine it made my vision blur.

"Don't yell at my mom," Leo said, his six-year-old voice cracking with defiance.

My heart wrenched violently in my chest. The kid was barely tall enough to reach my waist, yet he had thrown himself into the line of fire without hesitation. A Moretti trait. An instinct bred into the bone, impossible to erase.

Elena laid a gentle, trembling hand on the boy's shoulder, pulling him back down. "Leo, sit. Put your coat on. All of you, grab your backpacks. Right now."

"We aren't finished talking," I said, reaching out to grasp her forearm.

The moment my fingers brushed the wool of her sleeve, she flinched as if burned by an open flame. "Do not touch me, Dominic! You have no right to touch me. Not after what your family did."

"What my family did?" I echoed, stunned. "You vanished in the middle of the night! You left me with an empty bed and a police report!"

"You're late, Dominic," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh, desperate whisper as a waiter glanced curiously in our direction. Her eyes flicked toward the vintage grandfather clock near the entrance. It was 7:12 PM. "Your face is on the cover of the society pages tonight. The engagement gala at the Charles River Conservatory. Sloane Barrett. That’s where you belong. Not here."

She knew. She had seen the news.

"Elena, look at them," I demanded, gesturing toward the four boys who were now hurriedly shoving coloring books into worn canvas bags. "Look at their faces. Look me in the eye and tell me those boys aren't mine."

Tears welled in her eyes, brilliant and angry. "They are my sons, Dominic. You chose your empire six years ago. You chose your bloodline over me. Leave us alone."

"I never chose—"

"Go to your fiancée," she hissed.

Before I could grab her wrist again, she swept her purse off the chair, scooped up two of the boys by the hand, and nudged the other two ahead of her. "Run to the revolving door, boys! Quick!"

"Elena, stop!" I barked.

She didn't look back. She broke into a sprint through the dining room, cutting through the stunned patrons, pushing through the heavy glass exit toward the rainy Boston street outside.

I took two steps to pursue her when my phone buzzed violently against my chest.

I pulled it out. The caller ID flashed: Salvatore Moretti.

My uncle. The man who held the purse strings of the family’s political machine, the man who had brokered tonight's alliance with the Barrett dynasty, and the man who had sworn six years ago that Elena Vance was nothing more than an ambitious gold-digger who had taken five hundred thousand dollars to walk away.

I let the phone ring out in my hand.

I sprinted through the front doors of the restaurant into the cold October drizzle.

The taillights of a yellow cab were already accelerating into the stream of traffic on Boylston Street. Standing on the wet curb, my breath billowing in white clouds, I looked down at the pavement where she had been standing seconds before.

Lying in a puddle was a small, crumpled piece of paper.

I knelt, ignoring the water seeping into my tailored trousers, and picked it up.

It was a crayon drawing on cheap restaurant placemat paper. Four small stick figures with black hair stood in a neat row. Above them, drawn in heavy, bold black lines, was a massive figure wearing a dark suit and a gold watch. Beneath the drawing, written in a child’s clumsy, uneven handwriting, was a single word:

Dad.

My hand tightened around the paper until the edges tore.

The engagement party was starting in eighteen minutes. Sloane Barrett was waiting beneath the glass roof of the conservatory, surrounded by five hundred of the most powerful people in Massachusetts.

I stood up, crushed the drawing against my chest, and turned toward my black Maybach idling across the avenue.

The diamond ring in my pocket felt like dead weight.