Crayon Drawings and Gunfire
The travel from Dante’s private production office, Thorne Studios to The Sunburst Motel, Room 14, outskirts of LA consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The wine glass trembled in Dante’s grip. Not from fear—fear was a luxury he’d learned to shed years ago, somewhere between the first Covington shakedown and the last time he’d held his son. The tremor came from the weight of what he’d just said aloud. Words that had lived in his chest like shrapnel for eight years, finally extracted.
Nadia’s face had gone still. Not the stillness of shock—the stillness of a woman calculating odds in a game she’d never wanted to play. She set her own glass down without drinking, her fingers tracing the rim in a slow, deliberate arc. The motel clock on the nightstand ticked. Fourteen seconds passed.
“A trial week,” she said finally. Her voice was sandpaper over gravel. “Supervised. In a location I choose. You don’t know where Jace sleeps, what school he attends, or the names of his friends. You get an hour a day. Three times, you’re late or you don’t show, and the arrangement dies permanently.”
Dante had expected a slap. A scream. A door in his face. This clinical dissection of terms was worse—it meant she’d already decided, already built the walls. He was being allowed through a side entrance, not the front door.
“Agreed.” He set the wine glass down. “Every condition.”
Nadia’s eyes flicked to the bedroom door where Jace slept. In that glance, Dante saw the war she fought every day: the need to protect versus the truth that no protection was absolute. The Covingtons didn’t have to know the address. They just had to know the boy existed. One photograph, one leaked enrollment record, one bribed social media data miner, and Jace became a bargaining chip.
“The Sunburst Motel,” she said. “Room fourteen. Tomorrow at noon. Flynn can sweep it first. If there’s a single wire, a single camera, a single person watching from a van—” She let the sentence hang like a guillotine blade.
“There won’t be.”
She stood. The interview was over. Dante rose with her, watching her walk to the bedroom door. She paused with her hand on the knob, her back to him.
“He draws,” she said, so quietly he almost missed it. “Every day. He has a sketchbook full of things he’s never seen but imagines anyway. Castles. Oceans. A house with a red door.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “He drew a man once. Tall. Dark hair. He told his teacher it was a superhero he made up.”
Dante’s throat closed. He couldn’t speak.
“If you hurt him,” Nadia continued, her voice hardening back into armor, “if you show up and disappear again, I will find a way to make sure you regret being born. I don’t know how. But I’ll find it.”
She opened the door and stepped inside, closing it between them with a soft click that sounded like a gunshot.
Dante stood in the motel room’s main space—a sad little box with floral wallpaper peeling at the seams and a television bolted to a dresser—and let the silence wash over him. He counted the cracks in the ceiling tiles. There were forty-seven. He’d count them again tomorrow.
—
Noon arrived with the weight of a death sentence.
Dante had been in position since 11:03, having driven three different vehicles through a winding route that would have made a CIA analyst dizzy. The Sunburst Motel sat on the outskirts of LA like an afterthought—a two-story L-shaped building with a flickering vacancy sign and a pool that hadn’t seen chlorine since the Bush administration. Flynn had swept the room at 10:30 and pronounced it clean. No bugs, no cameras, no surveillance vehicles within a two-block radius. But Dante still felt the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention. Old habits.
He stood by the window, angled so he could see the parking lot through a gap in the cheap curtains. A blue sedan pulled in at 11:58. Nadia got out first, scanning the lot with the sharp, hunted look of a woman who’d spent eight years looking over her shoulder. Then she opened the back door.
Jace climbed out.
He was smaller than Dante had imagined. Eight years old, with a mop of dark hair that curled at the edges and Nadia’s serious brown eyes. He wore a dinosaur t-shirt and carried a sketchbook pressed against his chest like a shield. He looked up at the motel with the wary curiosity of a child who’d learned that new places meant new dangers.
Nadia took his hand. They walked to Room 14.
Dante opened the door before she could knock. He’d rehearsed what to say—something calm, something measured, something that wouldn’t scare an eight-year-old boy. The moment he saw Jace’s face, every rehearsed word evaporated like mist in a desert.
“Hi,” he said. It came out hoarse.
Jace studied him with an unnerving intensity. Children saw things adults trained themselves to ignore. They saw the truth behind the mask. Dante held his breath.
“You’re the superhero,” Jace said.
Nadia’s hand flew to her mouth. Dante felt something crack open in his chest—a seam he’d welded shut years ago, now splitting under the pressure of those four words.
“I’m just a guy,” Dante managed. “But I’m a guy who’s going to be here. From now on.”
Jace considered this. Then he walked past Dante into the room, dropped his sketchbook on the bed, and opened it to a page near the middle. “I drew you something.”
The drawing was crude in the way of all eight-year-old art—stick figures with oversized heads, a sun in the corner with sunglasses, a rainbow arcing across the page. But at the center of the rainbow stood three figures. A man with dark scribbles for hair. A woman with a smile that took up half her face. And a small figure between them, holding both their hands.
“That’s you and Mommy,” Jace said, pointing. “And that’s me. Under the rainbow. Because rainbows mean it stopped raining.”
Dante’s knees gave out. He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, the drawing blurring as his vision swam. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, but the tears came anyway—hot, silent, unstoppable. Eight years of absence. Eight years of birthdays missed, school plays never seen, bedtime stories never read. Eight years of a boy drawing a father he’d never met.
A small hand touched his knee.
“Why are you crying?” Jace asked. Not accusing. Just curious.
Dante lowered his hands. He looked at his son—his real, breathing, infinitely precious son—and let the tears fall. “Because I’m happy,” he said. “And sometimes, when you’re really happy, your eyes leak.”
Jace giggled. It was the most beautiful sound Dante had ever heard.
Nadia stood in the doorway, arms crossed, face unreadable. But Dante saw the way her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. The way her jaw unclenched, just slightly. A crack in the wall.
—
They spent four hours together.
Jace drew eleven pictures. Dante helped him color inside the lines, messed up on purpose, and let Jace correct him with the solemn authority of a child who took his art very seriously. They ate vending machine crackers and drank sodas that were mostly sugar. Nadia sat in the corner chair, reading a worn paperback, but Dante caught her watching them. Every time he looked up, she looked away.
At 3:45, Jace fell asleep on the bed, his head on the sketchbook, crayon smeared across his cheek. Dante pulled a thin motel blanket over him.
“He’s never done that,” Nadia said quietly. “Fallen asleep around someone new. It takes him weeks to feel safe enough.”
Dante didn’t turn around. He was too busy memorizing the rise and fall of his son’s chest. “I’m not someone new. I’m his father.”
“You’re a stranger who shares his DNA,” Nadia said. But there was no venom in it. Just exhaustion.
“I know.” Dante finally turned. “And I know it’s going to take a long time to change that. But I’m going to change it. I swear to you, Nadia. Whatever it takes.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded, just once, and looked away.
—
Midnight.
Dante was asleep on the floor, his back against the wall, one hand stretched out to where Jace’s small fingers dangled off the edge of the bed. He’d been dreaming of nothing—the deep, dreamless sleep of a man who’d finally stopped running—when the sound cut through.
*Crack.*
Glass breaking. Somewhere in the motel.
Dante was on his feet before the second sound registered. A door splintering. Room 16, two doors down. He’d memorized the layout of the Sunburst in the first ten minutes. The rooms were connected by a common hallway, the windows facing the parking lot. No rear exit from the rooms themselves—you had to go through the hallway to reach the fire stairs at the end.
“Nadia.” His voice was low but sharp. She was already awake, already moving, her hand clamped over Jace’s mouth before the boy could make a sound.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Dante didn’t answer. He was at the window, peering through the curtain. Three black SUVs sat in the parking lot, engines running, headlights off. Men in tactical gear fanned out across the lot, their movements synchronized, professional. Two took positions at the ends of the building, covering the exits.
Reid Covington didn’t send amateurs.
“Bathroom,” Dante said. “Now. Lock the door. Don’t open it until I tell you.”
Nadia scooped Jace up—the boy was fully awake now, eyes wide, trembling—and carried him to the bathroom. She paused at the door. “Dante—”
“I’m not dying today,” he said. “I just found him.”
She closed the door. The lock clicked.
Dante moved to the nightstand, pulled open the drawer. Flynn had left a Glock 19 with two extended magazines, taped to the underside. Dante checked the chamber, racked a round, and positioned himself beside the door. He counted his breaths. In. Out. In. Out.
The footsteps in the hallway were quiet. Professional. Three sets, at least. They paused outside Room 14.
A low voice: “Breach in three. Two. One.”
The door exploded inward.
Dante didn’t wait for the first man to clear the threshold. He fired twice—center mass, the way Flynn had drilled into him a hundred times in a hundred different safe houses. The first attacker dropped. The second tried to bring his rifle up, but Dante had already shifted, firing again. Glass shattered. The second man went down.
From the hallway, a third voice: “He’s in there! Flank right!”
Dante flattened himself against the wall as a burst of automatic fire tore through the door frame. Splinters exploded. Something hot sliced across his left shoulder—a graze, bleeding, but not deep. He ignored it.
Then Flynn’s voice, from somewhere down the hall: “Dante, get down!”
Dante dropped. The hallway erupted in a deafening roar—Flynn’s suppressed rifle, three-round bursts, perfectly spaced. Return fire. The staccato rhythm of a man who’d spent twenty years in private military contracting and knew exactly how to clear a corridor.
Dante counted. Twelve rounds fired. Then silence.
The bathroom door cracked open. Nadia’s face appeared, pale as bone. “Are they—”
“Stay inside.” Dante’s voice was hard, controlled. He scanned the room, the broken window, the two bodies on the floor. The third had retreated, dragging his wounded partner. Through the shattered door, he saw Flynn in the hallway, rifle up, scanning.
“Two down,” Flynn said. “Third ran. But they’ll call for reinforcements. We’ve got maybe three minutes.”
Dante grabbed Jace’s sketchbook from the bed. He shoved it into his jacket, then moved to the bathroom door, pulling it open. Nadia stood inside, Jace buried in her arms, her back pressed against the tiled wall.
“They found us,” Nadia choked, clutching Jace.
Dante pressed a towel to his bleeding shoulder. “No. I found you. And I’m never letting go again. Flynn, get us to the safehouse. Now.”