He kissed her forehead. “Only one?”
Her smile was weak but real. “We really are a family.”
He bent and kissed Luca’s tiny head, then her temple, and understood that love had not saved them because it was dramatic. It had saved them because, finally, it had become honest.
Outside the hospital window, Chicago moved with its usual appetite. Traffic lights changed. Deals were made. Strangers crossed streets. The city remained itself, hard-edged and restless.
But inside that room, Dominic Russo was no longer the man who believed protection meant distance, and Evelyn was no longer the woman forced to carry fear alone. They had crossed back toward each other one difficult truth at a time, and the child sleeping between them was not a symbol of possession or leverage or revenge.
He was simply the proof that life could return after ruin, and that some hearts, no matter how badly managed, still knew their way home.
THE END
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