Chapter 5 — The First Sleepless Night

The crib lasted exactly one night. After that, Dante gave up on the whole idea.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. He’d put the thing together himself—mostly—and tucked it right next to his own bed instead of in the nursery, figuring that being close by would fix whatever the problem was. At Marco’s insistence, he’d even skimmed an article about infant sleep schedules that used the phrase "self-soothing" so many times it started to sound like a threat. He’d dimmed the lights, kept his voice down, and followed every single tip from the four parenting print-outs Salvatore had left on his desk without saying a word.

The second Luna touched the mattress, she screamed. And she didn't stop.

He tried the star mobile. He tried the white noise machine Enzo had bought—apparently operating on the theory that spending money equals competence. In a moment of total desperation around midnight, he even tried singing. It was a quiet, clumsy version of an old Italian lullaby he barely remembered, something his mother had sung to him a lifetime ago, in a world that felt completely disconnected from the one he lived in now.

Nothing worked. Not until he finally just picked her up and held her. The screaming stopped within thirty seconds, replaced by the little hiccupping breaths of a baby who had decided, with absolute certainty, that sleep only happened under one specific condition.

That condition was Dante. Only Dante. Held, upright, and moving. The crib was now just an expensive piece of furniture she had no intention of using.

By one in the morning, Dante had paced the length of the second floor more times than he could count. He was barefoot, his tie was tossed somewhere on the bedroom floor, and Luna was out cold against his shoulder. He moved in slow, steady loops past the same paintings and closed doors, because the second he stopped walking, she stirred, and the second she stirred, he started walking again to avoid the alternative.

He passed Marco’s room around two and saw the light leaking out from under the door. He knocked with his free hand.

Marco opened the door in sweatpants, looking exhausted. A laptop was open on his bed behind him, still loaded on some infant sleep-training forum.

"She won't sleep unless I'm holding her," Dante said, skipping the pleasantries.

"I know, boss. I looked it up. It's called—"

"I don't care what it's called. I just want it to stop."

Marco winced, glancing at the screen like it might have an answer he hadn't already tried explaining twice that day. "Some babies just need contact, boss. You can't fix this tonight. You just have to get through it."

"How?"

"By holding her," Marco said. "Until she's older and doesn't need it as much. There's no shortcut. Sorry."

Dante looked down at Luna. She was deeply, peacefully asleep, completely unaware that she’d just delivered a verdict neither men in the hallway had any power to argue with.

"How long does that usually take?"

"Depends on the kid," Marco said. "Weeks. Sometimes longer."

Dante didn't react the way a normal business owner—facing weeks of no sleep and a precarious schedule of shipments and negotiations—would be expected to. He just nodded once, shifted his grip, and turned back to his slow loop of the hallway.

"Boss," Marco said before he got far. "You could hand her to one of us. Rotate it. You don't have to do this every single night."

"I know."

"But you're going to do it anyway."

It wasn't really a question, and Dante didn't really answer, but the silence said enough. Marco just nodded, closed his door quietly, and let it go.

***

By four in the morning, Dante stopped pacing and sank into the armchair in the corner of his room. Luna was finally deep enough in sleep that he didn't think he needed to keep moving, though he was too terrified to test that theory by trying to put her in the crib six feet away.

He sat there, watching her chest rise and fall in the dim light. For the first time all night, he let his mind go where it had been avoiding: he stopped treating this as a temporary problem to be managed and actually thought about what was happening.

He thought about the note. Luna One word, no explanation, from a woman who had walked away without looking back. He thought about the leads his men had chased—hospitals, clinics, adoption agencies—and how every single one had come up empty. It was as if whoever had left her had planned her disappearance with the same precision Dante would use to make a body vanish.

That should have worried him more. A trail that clean isn't an accident. It meant someone with resources and training, someone who wanted to be absolutely sure they couldn't be traced.

He filed that thought away, the same way he handled any threat he didn't have enough info on yet. Then he looked back at the small, warm weight on his chest, totally unbothered by any of it.

Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, without ever deciding to do so, Dante Moretti had stopped thinking of her as a problem to be solved and started thinking of her as his. The shift had happened so quietly and so completely that he couldn't have told you the exact moment it happened, even if someone held a gun to his head.

He was still in that chair when the sun came up. He was wide awake despite the exhaustion pulling at his bones—not because Luna needed him, but because some part of him, a part that didn't fit into a life built on total control, wasn't ready to put her down yet.

When Salvatore knocked at seven with the morning reports, he found his employer unshaven and still in yesterday's clothes. Dante was sitting in the armchair with a sleeping baby curled against his chest and a look on his face that Salvatore had never seen before. It wasn't exhaustion, though he looked exhausted.

It was something closer to peace.

"Rough night, boss?" Salvatore asked, carefully setting the reports on the desk.

Dante looked down at Luna, who was still oblivious to the fact that she’d spent her first full night rearranging the emotional plumbing of one of the most dangerous men in the city.

"The worst," Dante said. It was the biggest lie Salvatore had ever heard him tell.