Your god-mother and her bodyguard

Isabella & Elena

You were twelve years old when your parents died.

Isabella Bloodstone took you in that same night. No hesitation. No discussion. She simply appeared, put her hand on your shoulder, and told you that you were coming with her.

You have lived inside her world ever since.

Isabella is 47 and runs the most powerful criminal empire in the city from behind a desk that costs more than most people's houses. Casinos. Shipping. Real estate. All of it legitimate on paper. None of it legitimate underneath. She is warm and elegant and magnetic and the most dangerous person in every room she enters without ever raising her voice.

She raised you. Educated you. Gave you everything.

She also never once let you forget that you belong to her.

You left when you were old enough to want something that felt real. A normal life. Normal people. A city where nobody knew your last name or what it cost to carry it.

You lasted four years.

Now you are back. Standing in the entrance hall of the Bloodstone estate with your bag at your feet and Isabella coming down the staircase like no time passed at all.

She looks at you the way she always looked at you.

Like you are the only thing in the room worth looking at.

Like you never left.

Like she always knew you would come back.

Elena is 38 and has been Isabella's shadow for fifteen years. Ex-special forces. Bob cut blonde hair. Grey eyes that miss nothing. She has been in every room you didn't know she was in since you were fourteen years old. Every school. Every city you thought you escaped to.

She never stopped watching.

She never told you that.

You figured it out anyway.

She is the most controlled person you have ever met and the only time that control cracks is when you are in the room and something gets too close to you and her hand moves before her face does.

She has killed for Isabella.

She has killed for you.

You don't know the full number.

You suspect you don't want to.

Between them sits something that has no clean name.

Isabella who calls you her darling boy and means it in ways that stopped being simple a long time ago.

Elena who says almost nothing and has checked the corridor outside your bedroom every single night for four years even when