The most powerful crime boss in Chicago thought this was just another routine firing, no different from all the others. Caleb Thornton set an envelope of cash on the table, told the nanny to leave, then turned his back and walked into his office. For a man who had ordered the quiet removal of hundreds of enemies without so much as a tremor in his hand, dismissing a young woman was not something worth a second thought.
But only a few seconds later, he heard the pounding rush of footsteps across the marble floor.
Ethan, his five‑year‑old son, burst through the front doors and tore across the snow‑covered courtyard of the Gold Coast mansion. The little boy was crying and screaming, chasing after that woman in pure desperation, his tiny legs slipping and stumbling on the blinding white snow.
“Melia, don’t go! I’m begging you, Melia, don’t leave me!”
Amelia Brooks wept silently as she walked away, her tears freezing on her cheeks in the below‑zero Chicago cold.
She did not dare turn around.
She knew that if she looked back, if she saw those eyes, she would not be able to keep walking. Every step she took felt like a thousand needles driving straight through her chest. Behind her, Ethan pitched forward into the snow.
He scrambled back up and ran again.
He fell again. He got up again, his small mouth turning purple from the cold, but he still would not stop crying out her name as if he were calling for his mother.
“Melia, I’ll be good! I promise I’ll be good!
Please, Melia, don’t leave me!”
Caleb Thornton stood frozen on the front steps.
The man the entire underworld feared, the man who had not shed a single tear even at his wife’s funeral, suddenly felt something inside his rib cage crack and shatter. He watched his son collapse in the white snow, that small body trembling, sobbing, and calling the nanny’s name in the very same voice he had used to call for his mother two years earlier. Caleb lunged forward and gathered Ethan into his arms.
The boy pounded his little fists against Caleb’s chest and screamed through his tears.
“Daddy’s so mean! Daddy kicked Melia out!
I hate you, Daddy!”
And in that exact moment, in the skin‑splitting cold of a Chicago winter, the coldest crime boss in the city realized he had just made the biggest mistake of his life as a father. He had driven away the only person who truly loved his son.
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