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"Try your mafia tactics. Try that talk about turning Europe upside down. See if you can take a child from his mother's hands."

That last sentence was a poisoned dagger thrust precisely through every piece of armor I wore.

She said "take a child from his mother's hands." When she said it, her right hand unconsciously clenched the fabric at her side, knuckles white. All color had drained from her face, but her chin stayed stubbornly lifted. The tears spinning in her eyes refused to fall even one drop.

Something indescribable spread through my chest.

Ruby now had shed all her former innocence and naivety. She was sharp as a frozen rose on a winter night.

That girl who danced clumsily by the Seine in Paris seemed to have vanished in these four years.

But my heart pounded harder and harder against my ribs.

Customers pushed out of the dessert shop. Cold wind rushed into the corridor, scattering her hair. Leon called "Mamma" from inside, voice clear and happy.

I knelt on the ground, looking up at her.

Too many emotions churned in my chest. Unwillingness. Pain. The humiliation of being seen through. And that controlling instinct carved into my bones for forty-eight years—all of it screaming for me to stand up, to use more forceful methods to lock her and Leon beside me.

But finally, beneath all those emotions, something heavier, more stable, was slowly settling.

A kind of awe.

She didn't need me to give her dignity.

I lowered my head. Slowly raised my right hand. Palm up, five fingers spread, stopping half a step from her feet on the floor.

The cement floor under the corridor was hard. My palm pressed against that freezing gray ground. Cold climbed along my palm lines straight into my wrist. This position was lower than kneeling on one knee earlier. More like prostrating. I heard Isabella's breathing hitch through the door cracked slightly open. Leon seemed to ask something and got gently hushed by Isabella.

I took a deep breath.

"I swear."

I felt my voice roll once in my throat before continuing.

"I, Marcelo Moretti—by the spirits of all my Moretti ancestors, by three hundred years of Moretti family blood oaths, by my own life—accept your three conditions. If I break them, you don't need to lift a finger. I'll return this life to you myself."

Each word landed, crashing into the air under the corridor, so heavy even I found them unfamiliar.

Palm pressed to ground. Cold piercing to bone. I remembered four years ago on that rainy Hoboken night when I threw the fifty-thousand-dollar check at her chest—it was this same right hand. This hand had snapped throats in Brooklyn slaughterhouses, been stained with muggers' blood in Paris alleys, left the cruelest humiliation on the person I should have cherished most that rainy night.

Now it lay spread on the ground. Palm lines embedded with gun calluses and old scars that wouldn't wash clean. Waiting for her judgment.

Ruby looked down at my spread palm for a long time.

Long enough for passersby in the corridor to turn back curiously. Long enough for Leon to call for Mamma again, drowsiness in his voice. Long enough for the cold from the floor to soak through my palm, my finger joints starting to stiffen.

Then she bent down.

She didn't take my hand. She just extended her right hand. Her index finger landed lightly in my palm and tapped once.

That touch was light as a leaf falling on water. Warm. Soft. Carrying the thin calluses her fingertips had from years of holding scissors. My five fingers instinctively wanted to close, trap that finger in my palm—but I didn't move. I crushed that impulse down hard. Didn't even dare bend a knuckle. Let that index finger rest in my palm for one second. Two seconds.

Then she pulled back her hand, straightened up, turned, and pushed open the booth's glass door.

Warm yellow light and sweet strawberry scent poured through the gap. Leon's little figure rushed forward, shadow dancing behind the door, calling in his baby voice. "Mamma! Isa said I can have one more macaron!"

"No. You used up your sweets quota today."