Chapter 2: A Promise Never Forgotten
Chapter 2: A Promise Never Forgotten
The apartment building looked ready to collapse.
Rain leaked through broken gutters.
Paint peeled from the walls.
Lucas climbed three flights of stairs with Emma holding his hand.
Apartment 3B.
Emma pushed the door open.
“Mommy! I'm back!”
No answer.
The room smelled of medicine and damp blankets.
On a narrow bed near the window lay a woman.
Pale.
Weak.
Barely conscious.
Lucas stopped breathing.
“Sarah.”
Her eyes opened slowly.
For a moment she looked confused.
Then recognition appeared.
“Lucas?”
Twenty years vanished.
He was no longer the feared boss of Boston.
He was the reckless teenager she had once bandaged after a knife fight.
The young woman smiled weakly.
“You actually survived.”
Lucas moved closer.
“You remember me?”
“I remember everything.”
A doctor Lucas had brought with him examined her immediately.
The diagnosis was serious.
Untreated pneumonia.
Another week without care might have killed her.
Emma looked terrified.
“Is Mommy going to die?”
Lucas knelt beside her.
“No.”
The word came out harder than he intended.
“No, she isn't.”
The doctor arranged emergency treatment.
As paramedics carried Sarah downstairs, she grabbed Lucas's wrist.
“There was something I wanted to tell you years ago.”
“What?”
Tears appeared in her eyes.
“You once promised that if I ever needed help, you'd come.”
Lucas remembered.
He had been seventeen.
Bleeding.
Broken.
Angry at the world.
Sarah had cleaned his wounds and given him food.
Before leaving, he had made a foolish promise.
One day I'll repay you.
He had never seen her again.
Until now.
May you like
And somehow, fate had sent her daughter to his front gate.
Through a thunderstorm.
