The afternoon my maid asked me for two months of salary in advance and begged to leave early, I assumed someone had compromised her. So I followed her through freezing Chicago rain expecting to find a rival, an informant, or a man blackmailing one of my employees—but instead I found Linda on her knees beside a dying seven-year-old boy, crying into his hospital blanket because she was eighty thousand dollars away from saving his life.

The next afternoon, the estate was cloaked in heavy, suffocating silence.

While my capos gathered in the basement bunker mapping out the Moretti family's supply routes, I found myself drawn back to the east wing.

Keo was sitting up in bed, color flushed across his cheeks. On the duvet before him lay a spread of plastic action figures, including the battered Captain Galaxy.

"Mr. Gallo!" Keo beamed when I entered. "Look! The doctors let me eat real pancakes today!"

Linda was sitting near the window, a book open on her lap. She looked up, offering a tired but radiant smile that caught in my throat.

"Pancakes are a sign of strength," I said, walking over and taking a seat beside the bed. I pulled a small, velvet-lined box from my pocket and set it on the nightstand. "I had one of my men pick something up for your collection."

Keo opened the box with wide, trembling fingers. Inside lay a pristine, limited-edition die-cast figurine of Captain Galaxy from 1985—a collector's item I had forced an antique dealer in Manhattan to part with at triple its value.

"Whoa..." Keo gasped, his small hands carefully lifting the heavy metal figure. "He has the shield! The unbreakable one!"

"That shield protects him from anything the galaxy throws at him," I said quietly. "Just like the medicine is protecting you."

"Can I give you something too?" Keo asked suddenly.

I raised an eyebrow. "What could you possibly give me?"

He reached down, picked up his old, battered plastic toy with the chipped blue paint, and pressed it into my large, calloused palm. "Take this one. So when you have to go fight the bad men outside, Captain Galaxy can watch your back."

I looked down at the scratched, faded plastic piece in my hand. In thirty-five years of violence, no one had ever offered to protect me. Men had begged for their lives, sworn blood oaths, or tried to put bullets in my skull. But this boy, facing death every second of his life, wanted to shield me.