She was a complete stranger and yet he felt possessive toward her. Respectful. Two emotions he’d never accorded any woman not related to him.

“Rosalie!” her mother had snapped as she came back for her daughter. “You do not talk to such men. How many times must I say that to you.” She took Rosalie by the arm and offered him a pleading, servile glance. “Forgive my daughter, senhor. She is young and foolish.”

“It’s fine, senhora,” he said quickly. Then he met Rosalie’s wide-eyed stare. She was truly beautiful. Her black hair was braided and coiled around her head, exposed to him when her church veil had fallen off after they collided. Her dark brown eyes were pure. Innocent. Completely unspoiled by the bloody violence that made up his life. Most of all, her eyes were kind.

He didn’t want anything to sully that gaze. To make it hard and cold. Bitter.

Like his.

“May I have permission to court your daughter?” The question was out of his mouth before he could stop it. Her mother’s expression was one of pure horror. White Irishmen didn’t court Portuguese women. Society would never tolerate such a thing.

“No,” she said sharply, hauling her daughter away from him.

Jamie might have taken no for an answer.

Gallagher didn’t.

It had cost him well over one hundred dollars in bribes to locate Rosalie, but she had been worth every cent of it. Regardless of her parents, his associates, and society as a whole, he had made her his wife on June 17, 1925.

Rosalie alone had known Jamie. And he had died trying to get to her side while she struggled to bring his one and only child, his son, into the world.

It had been a cold snowy night then, too. Just days before his thirty-third birthday. He’d known the authorities were after him, had known he had a mole in his company even though he had been trying to go straight.

None of that had mattered.

Rosalie had needed him, and he had refused to let her down.

It was a decision that had cost him his life and his soul.

1

Seventy years later
New Orleans

Gallagher frowned as he felt something tickling his lower back. It was a sensation that he’d learned years ago signaled a Daimon was nearby. He turned his one-of-a-kind 1932 Bugatti Atlantic Aerolithe down a side street and parked it.

Oh yeah, the feeling was there, even stronger than before. He left the car and paused as he got his bearings. In the last seventy years, he’d only been to New Orleans a handful of times, and though the city didn’t change much, it still took him a couple of minutes to remember the lay of the French Quarter.