Chapter 1 - THE WOMAN WHO MOVED FIRST
The steel baton was already falling when Mave Donovan moved.
Nineteen-year-old Lucia Colazo never saw the attacker behind her. Neither did the armed men surrounding her table until it was too late.
But Mave did.
The twenty-seven-year-old waitress had noticed the stranger minutes earlier. Wrong uniform. No name tag. A tray balanced like a man who had never carried one. Eyes that never looked at the food.
She warned her manager, Gerald Moss.
He dismissed her.
So when the stranger pulled a steel baton and charged Lucia, Mave crossed the dining room herself.
She shoved Lucia aside.
Then she turned.
The baton smashed across Mave's shoulder blade with a sickening crack.
She collapsed onto the marble, but even then, she wrapped both arms around Lucia.
“Don't be afraid. I'm here now.”
Security tackled the attacker seconds later.
Then Rafe Colazo arrived beside them.
Boston feared the thirty-six-year-old man in the black suit. Politicians returned his calls. Criminals whispered his name carefully. Men twice his size had gone silent when he entered rooms.
But Rafe dropped to his knees beside an injured waitress.
As he reached toward her, a photograph slipped from Mave's apron.
A nine-year-old boy smiled from a hospital bed, clutching a battered stuffed bear.
Rafe stared.
Something about the bear stopped him.
It was old, blue, and missing one black button eye.
Exactly like one he had seen every day of his childhood.
Mave weakly reached for the photograph.
“My brother.”
Her eyelids fluttered.
“Please… don't let anything happen to Finn.”
Then she lost consciousness.
Rafe picked up the photograph.
On the back, written in faded blue ink, were four words.
For Finn. Keep him safe.
Beneath them was a name.
Kathleen Donovan.
Rafe Colazo stopped breathing.
He knew that name.
His mother had whispered it only once in twenty years.
The night she told him there was one woman in Boston his family could never repay.
May you like
And that woman had supposedly died taking a secret to her grave.
---
