Chapter 6 - The Dragon and the Anchor
The battle for the Hunts Point estate lasted twenty-four terrifying minutes.
Inside the sealed master wing, I sat on the floor between Hazel and Iris’s beds, wrapping both of my arms tightly around my daughters while the dull, muffled thud of distant explosions and heavy gunfire vibrated through the floorboards.
Hazel didn't cry. She held her small silver cross necklace in her hand, her eyes fixed on the reinforced steel door. "Mommy?"
"I'm here, baby," I whispered, pressing my lips against her hair.
"Is the man with our eyes going to lose?" Iris asked, her voice trembling beneath her blanket.
I looked at the heavy gold signet ring Griffin had left on my bedside table earlier that morning—the dragon wrapping around the anchor.
"No, sweetie," I said, a sudden, absolute clarity settling into my chest, washing away eight years of fear and doubt. "He isn't going to lose. Not tonight."
At 12:15 AM, the heavy mechanical locks on the third-floor security door clicked open with a deep, pneumatic hiss.
The door swung inward.
Griffin stood in the doorway.
His charcoal turtleneck was torn at the shoulder, his face smeared with soot and dark gunpowder residue. A thin line of blood ran down his left jawline from a minor glass graze, but his eyes were bright, clear, and completely victorious.
Behind him, Julian stood in the corridor, holding a radio, giving quiet orders to a cleanup crew that was already working to clear the driveway.
Griffin stepped into the room. He didn't look like a mob boss returning from a massacre. He looked like a father coming home after a long day at the office.
He looked at the three of us sitting together on the floor.
"It’s over," Griffin said softly, his voice hoarse. "The Commission’s leadership in the Pacific Northwest has been completely dismantled. There is no one left to send an envelope. There is no one left to make a threat."
Hazel slid out from beneath my arm. She walked slowly across the plush carpet, stopping two feet from where the massive man stood covered in soot and blood.
She looked up at him with those unblinking green eyes.
"Are you our daddy?" Hazel asked again, her small voice filling the quiet room.
Griffin’s breath hitched in his throat. The man who had just dismantled an army of thirty assassins dropped to his knees on the carpet, bringing his large frame down until he was eye-level with his eight-year-old daughter.
Tears cut clean tracks through the soot on his cheeks.
"Yes, Hazel," Griffin whispered, his voice trembling with raw, unfiltered emotion. "I am your daddy. And I am so, so sorry it took me eight years to find you."
Hazel looked at him for three long seconds. Then she reached out her small, soft hand and gently wiped a streak of dark soot from his jawline.
"It's okay," Hazel said simply. "Mommy kept your ring."
Iris ran across the room next, throwing her small arms around Griffin’s neck. Griffin let out a choked, ragged sob, wrapping his massive, powerful arms around both of his daughters, holding them against his chest as if they were the only fragile, precious things in an entire universe of stone and iron.
I stood up slowly from the floor, my eyes blurred with tears, watching the man I had spent eight years running from hold our children with a reverence that bordered on holy.
Griffin looked up over the girls' shoulders at me.
The coldness was gone. The mob king was gone. There was only the man who had loved me in a tiny apartment eight years ago, the man who had promised to build a wall high enough to keep the monsters away.
"You don't have to run anymore, Sloan," Griffin whispered to me over our daughters' heads. "You don't have to change your name. You don't have to hide behind shell companies. I bought every firm, every lease, and every asset within fifty miles of this city today. This is your home now. All of it."
I walked across the room, stopping beside him. I reached down, placing my hand over his broad shoulder, feeling the deep, steady rise and fall of his chest.
"Is the war really over, Griffin?" I asked softly.
Griffin stood up, holding both girls in his arms as if they weighed nothing at all. He looked down at me, his sea-green eyes burning with a calm, eternal light.
"The war is over, Sloan," Griffin said, reaching out with one hand to take mine, his fingers intertwining with mine, sealing the bond that had been broken eight years ago. "Now... we just get to be a family."
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Outside, the first light of a crisp, clear December dawn began to break over the blue waters of Lake Washington, illuminating the grand, indestructible fortress on the point.
And for the first time in eight years, I didn't look for the exit. I held his hand, pulled my daughters close, and finally stepped into the light.
