Daniel Bailey couldn’t look his daughter in the eye. He knew that he should have made sure she was taken home, well away from the scrapyard. He could see the hollowness in her eyes; she had become very quiet since that night, and he blamed himself for it. She had only just lost her mother, and then she had been witness to such extreme violence, and he had been too wrapped up in his own grief to think about what was best for her. His guilt was doubled by the feeling that he had let his beloved Lena down; she had done everything in her power to protect their daughter from the Life, and he had undone all of that in just a few short days.

He missed his wife so much. The hardest thing for him to deal with was that she was gone because of his lifestyle. Lena had been frightened for so long that the Life would be the death of him – none of them had thought, even for a second, that it would one day be the death of her.

Daniel felt tears welling up, and he swallowed the urge to howl out his pain; it was crippling him. He was scared for the first time in his life – scared of being alone. Once Lena was buried, once he had avenged her death, he would be bereft; he knew he would not be able to cope, because he didn’t know how he was going to carry on without her. She had been his life, his companion, his lover, the only person to know everything about him – the good and the bad – and she had still loved him, no matter what. Now he was left with the responsibility of caring for their daughter and he wasn’t sure what to do or how to make things right for her, but he owed it to Lena to try.

First, all he really cared about was finding out who the fuck had been behind his wife’s murder and, therefore, who felt they were hard enough, powerful enough, to try and take out his brother. He couldn’t sleep, eat, or shit without those thoughts constantly playing on his mind. Knowing she was gone and how she had died was eating at him like a cancer. He hated being in his home, he hated being in his bed, he hated that he woke up every day and she was not there beside him. Every morning when he opened his eyes, the first thing he thought of was his wife’s terror as the bomb had gone off; she had to have known what was going on, even if only for a split second. It tortured him. Now, though, he had to try his best for their daughter.

‘Come on, Tania, eat your breakfast, darling.’