Chapter 1 - The Three Pebbles
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Rain battered the tall windows of the Duca estate, but inside the sewing room on the second floor, the world was perfectly still.
Four-year-old Noel sat on an oversized, faded floral armchair, her legs swinging inches above the floor. She wore thick pink plastic glasses that magnified her gray eyes, making her look perpetually surprised. In her lap rested a cloth horse with a single button eye, its stuffing leaking slightly from a torn seam.
She wasn't coloring. She was building.
On the wide wooden windowsill, she had arranged three small, smooth pebbles. They were placed in a precise, straight line, equidistant from each other. They were so clean they looked polished.
The heavy oak door, which had been slightly ajar, opened wider.
Raphael Duca stepped into the room. He wore a damp charcoal overcoat, returning from a meeting at the docks where men much older and much more aggressive had spoken to him in hushed, terrified tones. He was a man who moved through life expecting people to flatten themselves against walls to let him pass.
He stopped when he saw the little girl.
He did not know who she was. He knew every square inch of his territory, the names of the union bosses, the harbor masters, and the corrupt city officials. But he did not know why a child with pink glasses was sitting in an empty room of his fortress.
Raphael bent forward, resting his hands on his knees so he was at her eye level.
"What are you doing?" he asked, his voice low and quiet.
Noel looked up.
She did not flinch. She did not scramble backward. She simply pushed her pink glasses up the bridge of her nose with a wax-stained finger.
"I'm building a house," she answered, her voice small but entirely steady.
Raphael looked at the three pebbles on the sill. He did not ask how three rocks constituted a house. He did not ask where her mother was.
He simply smiled.
It was a brief, almost imperceptible lifting of the corner of his mouth, an expression so foreign to his face that it felt strange on his own skin. He straightened his posture, nodded once, and stepped backward out of the room, leaving the door exactly as he had found it.
May you like
He walked down the corridor toward the library, passing Mrs. Dora, the silver-haired head housekeeper.
Neither of them spoke. Raphael knew Mrs. Dora had seen the girl. Mrs. Dora knew Raphael had seen her. In the silent, unspoken language of the Duca household, the child had just been granted sanctuary.
