Nothing Left To Save

Only then did Damon remember that I had called him ninety-nine times on the night North Harbor exploded.

That evening, someone set fire to the warehouse at the old Westmore pier. My father, Arthur Westmore, was the last one out. He had gone back for the family bookkeeper and two children trapped inside, and the collapsing steel beam caught him across the chest. Shrapnel tore through him before anyone could pull him free.

By the time they carried him into St. Ambrose, his breathing was already thin.

The doctor on duty came out with blood on both hands and told me the trauma team had to move now.

But North Harbor had been locked down under Moretti orders. Without Damon's approval, ambulances couldn't get through, outside surgeons couldn't pass the checkpoints, and no helicopter could land on the roof. The Moretti private emergency unit answered to him and him alone.

I stood in the hallway and called him again and again with shaking fingers.

The first call rang out.

The seventeenth was cut off by his underboss.

The forty-sixth finally connected, but Selena Vale answered, her voice wet with tears. "Vivian, Damon is with me. Something happened on my end. Can you stop pushing him for five minutes?"

I gripped the phone and heard my father coughing blood behind the emergency-room doors. "Put him on. Now."

The other end went quiet. Then Damon's voice came on, deep and tired. "Vivi, don't panic. Selena's car had a little scrape, and she's shaken up. I'll come after I get this handled."

"My father is dying."

"Your father has survived gunfire, raids, and every purge North Harbor has ever thrown at him. He's tougher than all of us."

"Don't make this into a choice. Westmore still depends on Moretti, and you know I won't abandon you."

I didn't know then that his "little scrape" was nothing more than Selena breaking a crystal glass and cutting her palm.

A cut so small it didn't even need stitches kept Damon away all night.

And my father waited outside the operating room for a Moretti convoy that never came.

At three in the morning, he woke up once. Cold sweat covered his forehead, but his hand was steady as he reached into his inner pocket and pressed the black-gold signet into my palm.

The face of the ring bore the Westmore raven. Inside the band were his name and the family motto: Ravens do not kneel.

It was the symbol of the head of the Westmore family, and the last piece of dignity my father had left to give me.

He looked at me. His voice was so hoarse I almost couldn't hear him.

"Vivian, don't let them think a Westmore daughter was born to beg."

I held his hand and cried until no sound came out.

When my father was young, he took North Harbor's first pier line for Westmore with a gun and a handful of loyal men. For the next twenty years, he shielded every child, widow, and old soldier under our name.

At the end, he gave me the signet. "From now on, you are the last master of Westmore."

Before dawn, he stopped breathing. The doctor took off his gloves and said, "Miss Westmore, we did everything we could."

At that moment, the lights at the end of the St. Ambrose hallway came on one by one, but I couldn't see a thing.

I sent Damon one final message.

[Don't come.]

Half an hour later, he replied.

[Selena is asleep. I'll come home tomorrow. Stop making a scene.]

I looked at those words and suddenly laughed.

Damon had always been so sure I would never leave. Westmore's debts, Westmore's people, and the broken pieces of our old harbor business all leaned on Moretti to survive.

But after that explosion, Westmore had no bookkeeper, no children, and no family left for me to kneel for.

He thought he had his hand wrapped around my weakness.

He didn't know that weakness had burned with my home.