Page 70 of The Mafia Bloodline
I didn’t answer. My hands clawed at my own chest as if I could physically hold the bond together. Adrenaline knifed out of me in a hot, ugly surge. I tried to move to stagger forward, shout, tear the doors off the hinges, and the world bucked harder under the weight of the absence. Something in me began to unthread, a slow, vertiginous loosening that made my sight swim.
“Get him down!” Viking barked before I could do something worse.
Two of the changelings were on me like breakers on shore. Strong hands grabbed shoulders, wrists, pinned me with professional, winged force. Their grip held more than flesh; it held me from launching off a cliff. I struggled for a heartbeat, useless and furious, raw rage digitized into tremors across my skin.
Roman stepped forward alone, the air around him folding like thunder. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. He closed whatever ancient loop our family had, and I felt it: a pressure, a living braid of force that coiled through my body and took me in.
He laid a hand on my sternum. It wasn’t force so much as command an old, kingly law unspooling into my blood. His energy seeped into me like ice into a fevered wound, steadying the jagged edges of my mind. The world no longer threatened to snap in half. The emptiness in my chest rattled, then quieted into a faint ache.
Roman’s voice was low. “Breathe. Hear me. She’s alive.”
The brothers closed ranks. Lucien’s fingers dug into my shoulder. Viking grunted, more restraint than reassurance, butit was enough; Draugr remained a dark, unmoving presence. Together they built a cage around me of muscle and will. It kept me from moving, kept the angry animal caged until the animal could think.
There was a long, ragged minute where I had to fight against my own muscle memory, fight my hands from ripping through skin, fight my teeth from finding blood. I had to let the calm pull me whole again, because to lose it was to become something nobody would ever bring back.
Slowly, like the tide pulling back, the bond came back. A flicker at first and then her pain, a tiny whimper, and then the steady thumping again. I felt it settle, fragile but there: Runa is alive.
I sagged against Roman. The restraint loosened. The brothers let me breathe without letting me go. Roman didn’t break his contact; his fingers were iron on my shoulder, his presence a map back to the shore.
The doctor’s entrance cut cleanly through the aftermath. He looked at me, measured and direct. “Mr. Dragic,” he said, and the formality steadied me enough to think, “she’s in recovery. The procedure went as well as we could hope. We lost her for a minute there, but she is now stable.” His gaze flicked to Roman and the others, sharp. “You should come see her. Now.”
The world narrowed again to a corridor and the shuttled transport between rooms. I moved because I had a body that would not be denied the movement; the brothers fell into step around me like shuttle walls. Roman’s hand left my shoulder only to curl into a fist that flexed white-knuckled at his side.
When the door opened and I saw her, pale under the strips of clean gauze, hair loose and tangled, eyes closed and everything that could have been rational burned away. I had expected fear,or a hollow, but what hit me first was an animal relief so profound my knees trembled. She breathed. She was real. She was ours.
And then they showed me the child, a tiny little thing, innocent, fragile laying helpless in the incubator.
He was small as a fist and wild with noise, crying like he’d been dropped straight from thunder. He smelled faintly sweet, like the bloodline and something pure all wrapped into one brittle, tiny package.
I held him with my eyes haltingly at first, this new thing that belonged to me as much as she did, then closer, tidal, until my chest hurt with the fullness of it. The world reassembled itself around that moment.
My tongue felt huge and hoarse when I spoke. “My Son,” as my voice cracked.
Roman stepped forward, that old, grave warmth settling into his face. “You are now a Dragic, little man,” ancient threads attach in the dark. “May you be strong like your father.”
I touched the glass of the incubator near the baby’s forehead, I did it as if making an oath. My fingers trembled with something like holiness and ferocity. The bond hummed warmer than before, braided now with a new, smaller life.
When I finally looked up, my brothers were all there, Lucien with his jaw tight but proud, Viking with that rogue’s grin softened by something very close to tenderness, Draugr a shadow that steadied the light. Roman met my eyes and said one small thing that anchored me in dangerous, clean clarity: “He’s ours.”
I let out a sound that was equal parts laugh and sob. I looked at my son as if the whole of the world had narrowed to this single fragile being that was now protected by us, owned by us, and named in a language older than their enemies’ lies.
If Caesar returned, if the world burned, then let it. We would make sure the ashes spelled our names, and Runa’s, and this child’s. And I would be the fire that scorched anything that dared reach for them.
She blinked slow, deliberate, like a dawn breaking against a horizon I’d been starving for. Her lashes trembled and the room rearranged itself around that small, miraculous motion. Runa’s eyes opened and found me, and for an instant the whole world contracted until the only thing that existed was the space between us.
I inclined my head towards our child, careful with the way a man handles a hymnbook. He fussed, a tiny, furious protest. He was warm and wrinkled and everything that had ever scared me about my future rewired into a single, urgent certainty: protect this.
Her mouth curved around the barest of smiles, breath ragged but steady. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered, as if the word itself might sew us back together.
“He is,” I said. My voice broke and I hated it, hated that something so small could make me feel like a child again. I eased closer. “Runa…our son.”
She reached out her hand for him as if the world had taught her to be wary of reaching but not of reaching for this. Her fingers found the glass of the incubator and curled like the tide finding a shore. The look that flickered through her, equal parts awe and raw, untrained love that hit something in me that I hadn’tknown needed hitting. It splintered whatever leftover cruelty lived inside me and left only an animal softness.
The doctors hovered, professional and efficient; the monitors kept their slow, indifferent watch. Roman cleared his throat as if to remind us time still had shape. Lucien’s fingers tightened around Roman’s arm, a private nod across decades of blood. Viking, who’d been the loudest a week ago, stood quieter now, that grin softened into something like a blessing.
“We’ll give you privacy,” Roman said, but it was more than politeness. It was permission, an unspoken guard around the tenderness in the room. Draugr lingered in the doorway, a pillar of shadow and steadiness, before nodding. “Call when you need us.”
They left like that one by one, a procession of the men who’d build the world I’d dragged Runa into. Their footsteps faded and the door shut. The hospital beyond would be humming with plans and patrols and the endless machinery of men who knew how to make things disappear. For a beat, the noise of that life washed away and the room was only the three of us.
