The mafia boss ignored every beggar in New York until one little girl pointed at his ring and said, “My mother has that too”
Wet.
Deep.
Almost inhuman.
A woman shifted beneath gray blankets.
Dominic took one step forward.
The woman pulled the blanket down with a skeletal hand.
The world dropped away.
Clara Whitmore looked like death had been eating her slowly and had almost finished the meal. Her cheekbones were sharp beneath translucent skin. Her lips were cracked. Her dark hair had thinned and gone gray at the roots.
But it was her.
And against her hollow collarbone, tied on a cheap black shoelace, hung the second gold ring.
The two-headed hound.
Her fever-bright eyes struggled to focus. When they landed on him, her cracked lips parted.
“Dominic,” she whispered.
Something inside him broke so violently he almost reached for his gun.
Anger came first because anger was easier than grief. She had been alive. Alive while he mourned her. Alive while he destroyed men looking for the traitor who had supposedly sold him out. Alive while he turned himself into the thing she used to beg him not to become.
“You,” he said, voice low and deadly. “You let me think you were dead.”
Clara tried to speak, but the cough took her. Blood dotted her lips.
The little girl threw herself between them.
“Don’t touch her!” she hissed.
Dominic stared at the child, then at Clara’s burning skin, the trembling hands, the wet rattle in her chest.
The anger vanished.
Panic replaced it.
He pulled out his phone and called Paulie. “Fifth floor. Apartment 512. Bring the trauma kit.”
“Boss—”
“Now.”
Clara’s eyes fluttered.
“Leo,” she breathed. “Run.”
Dominic froze.
Leo Bianchi had been a rival underboss. The man everyone said Clara had been meeting the night she vanished. The man Dominic had killed three years ago with two bullets and no apology.
“I’m not Leo,” Dominic said. “Leo is dead.”
Clara’s eyes opened just enough to find him.
“I know,” she whispered. “I saw it on the news.”
Before he could answer, Paulie appeared in the doorway carrying a black medical bag. He took one look at Clara and went pale.
He had been there the night she disappeared. He had driven the chase car. He had heard Dominic scream her name from the bridge.
“Jesus Christ,” Paulie breathed.
“Not a word,” Dominic said. “Take the girl.”
The child backed away from him.
“I’ll walk,” she snapped.
Dominic slid his arms under Clara and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing. The feeling of her bones through the blanket made his stomach turn.
He looked down at the girl.
“Stay close,” he said. “If you run, I won’t chase you. And she dies here.”
It was cruel.
But Dominic Vale had never learned how to be gentle.
The girl stayed close to his coat all the way down the stairs.
They took Clara to a private underground clinic hidden beneath a laundromat in Queens, a place where gunshot wounds were stitched without police reports and men paid cash to keep secrets breathing.
Doc Miller, a disgraced trauma surgeon with trembling hands and debts large enough to own him, worked on Clara behind a plastic curtain while Dominic sat in a cracked chair and stared at the floor drain.
The girl sat across from him, knees tucked to her chest.
“What’s your name?” Dominic asked again.
She watched the curtain.
“Mia,” she said finally.
Dominic closed his eyes.
Mia.
Clara’s grandmother’s name.
The doctor stepped out forty minutes later, his gloves bloody, face gray.
“She’s stable for now,” Miller said. “But, Dom… it’s bad.”
Dominic stood.
“How bad?”
Miller swallowed. “Heavy metal poisoning. Severe. Chronic. Lead, maybe other compounds. Years of exposure. Her kidneys are failing. Her bones are contaminated. Her lungs are compromised. I can treat the pneumonia, but I can’t undo six years of poison.”
The word poison moved through Dominic like a blade.
Mia had climbed from her chair and stood at the curtain, staring at the shadow of her mother inside.
She did not cry.
That was what ruined him.
A child that young should cry. She should scream. She should ask adults to fix it.
Mia just stood there like someone who had already learned that adults did not fix anything.
Dominic turned to Paulie.
“Prepare the estate.”
Paulie’s eyes widened. “The Long Island house?”
“Medical wing. Hospital bed. Dialysis machine. Ventilator. Everything.”
“Dom, if Rossi hears you brought her there—”
Dominic looked at him.
“If Marco Rossi wants her,” he said softly, “he can come to my front door and ask. I’ll bury him under the driveway.”
Part 2
Dominic Vale’s Long Island estate sat behind iron gates, rolling lawns, and enough armed guards to make the place look like a private embassy for violence.
Mia stared at it through the car window like she had been driven to another planet.
The mansion was all limestone, glass, and old money bought with new blood. Fountains whispered in the dark. Security cameras watched from every corner. Men in black coats stood beneath the portico pretending not to stare at the rusted medical van behind Dominic’s Mercedes.
Clara was unloaded on a stretcher.
Mia moved when her mother moved.
Not toward Dominic.
Never toward Dominic.
Just close enough to see the gurney disappear through the side entrance.
Inside, the foyer smelled of cedar polish and lilies. Marble floors reflected the chandelier above. Mia’s duct-taped sneakers left dirty half-moons on the shine.
Dominic watched the staff watching her.
Then he said, “Everybody out.”
No one argued.
Within minutes, the grand house emptied until only Paulie, Doc Miller, the old housekeeper Helen, and the guards remained.
Dominic led Mia into the kitchen.
It was enormous, stainless steel and white stone, with copper pans hanging above an island bigger than the room where she had been living. Mia climbed onto a stool but kept one foot hooked around the chair leg, ready to run.
Dominic opened the refrigerator and stared at food prepared by a chef he rarely bothered to thank. Truffle pasta. Roasted salmon. Glass containers labeled with dates. Organic berries. Imported cheeses.
He ignored all of it.
He took out eggs, butter, and bread.
Mia watched every move.
The butter hissed in the pan. Her nostrils flared. Her stomach growled so loudly she pressed both hands over it, humiliated.
Dominic cracked the eggs and scrambled them badly. He burned one edge of the toast. He put the plate in front of her and slid over a fork.
“Eat.”
Mia looked at him.
“What do I owe?”
The question hit harder than any insult.
“Nothing.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Nothing is free.”
Dominic leaned against the counter. “In this house, tonight, it is.”
She still did not trust him.
But hunger won.
She grabbed the eggs with her fingers and shoved them into her mouth, swallowing too fast, barely breathing between bites.
“Slow down,” Dominic said. “You’ll get sick.”
Mia ignored him until the plate was empty. Then she picked up every crumb with her fingertips.
Dominic waited.
Then he asked, “Where were you before the apartment?”
Mia licked butter from her thumb. “The loud place.”
“What loud place?”
“The place with the machines.” Her voice went flat. “We weren’t supposed to go outside. The water tasted like pennies. The dust was yellow. Mama said not to breathe deep.”
Dominic’s hand tightened around the edge of the granite.
Pennies.
Yellow dust.
Machines.
He knew the place before she finished.
A shuttered munitions plant in Jersey, closed after contamination reports that had vanished from city files years ago. Lead. Sulfur. Chemical residue buried under concrete and corruption.
“Who kept you there?” he asked.
Mia went very still.
Dominic softened his voice as much as he could. “Mia.”
She looked at the empty plate.
“The man with melted skin.”
Paulie, standing near the doorway, muttered, “Victor.”
Dominic closed his eyes.
Victor Sane.
Marco Rossi’s cleaner.
A man with scar tissue climbing the left side of his neck from a botched arson job ten years earlier. He did not leave bullet holes. He did not make public messes. He made people vanish and turned their deaths into rumors.
Dominic understood then.
Rossi had not ordered Clara shot.
That would have been too quick. Too traceable. Too likely to send Dominic into a war before Rossi was ready.
He had locked her in poison.
A pregnant woman.
His woman.
His child.
Dominic turned away before Mia could see his face.
“Helen,” he called.
The housekeeper entered, gray hair pulled back, posture rigid.
“Wash her,” Dominic said. “Burn the clothes. Feed her again, lightly. Then put her in the blue guest room near the medical wing.”
Mia jumped off the stool. “No.”
Helen stopped.
Dominic looked down. “No?”
“I stay with Mama.”
“Your mother is with the doctor.”
“I stay with Mama.”
“She is very sick.”
“I know.”
Dominic stared at her.
The child had his stubbornness. That annoyed him more than it should have.
“You can see her after Helen gets you clean.”
Mia’s lip trembled, but she fought it like crying was a crime.
“The man said if I left the box, men with guns would shoot us.”
Dominic knelt slowly so his eyes were level with hers.
“Mia,” he said. “There are men with guns here too.”
She froze.
“But they belong to me.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“No,” Dominic said after a moment. “It doesn’t.”
For the first time, something like surprise crossed her face.
He did not lie to her.
That was the first brick in a bridge neither of them knew they were building.
Helen took Mia upstairs. Dominic went down.
The medical wing had once been a wine cellar. Now it was white tile, steel cabinets, monitors, oxygen tanks, and a hospital bed under bright lights. Clara lay in the center of it, hooked to tubes, her face nearly transparent.
Doc Miller adjusted an IV bag. “She woke once.”
Dominic approached the bed.
Clara’s eyes opened before he touched her.
“You still scowl,” she whispered. “Even after six years.”
Dominic swallowed.
“Save your breath.”
She smiled weakly. “For what?”
He gripped the railing until his knuckles whitened.
“Why?” The word came out broken and violent. “Why didn’t you come to me? Why let me believe you betrayed me?”
Clara’s eyes filled.
“It was Rossi.”
Dominic had known.
Still, hearing it from her mouth changed the room.
“He found out I was pregnant,” she said, each word costing her. “He said your bloodline was becoming too powerful. He said if I stayed, he would kill you, wait until the baby was born, and make me watch him kill her too.”
Dominic’s chest constricted.
“He gave me a choice,” Clara whispered. “Disappear. Let everyone think I was a rat. Let you hate me. Or watch you both die.”
“You should have told me.”
“You would have gone to war that night.”
“Yes.”
“And died.”
“No.”
“Dominic.” Her hand moved weakly against the sheet. “You were powerful. Rossi was patient. There’s a difference.”
He had no answer.
The monitor beeped unevenly.
“They kept us in that factory,” Clara said. “Victor brought food. Water. Sometimes medicine if he wanted me alive enough to suffer. I knew the dust was killing me. I tried to keep Mia away from it. I drank less so she could have the bottled water. I ate what smelled wrong so she wouldn’t.”
Dominic turned his face away.
“Look at me,” Clara whispered.
He did.
“She’s yours.”
His throat closed.
“I know.”
“No. You don’t.” Clara’s eyes sharpened through the pain. “Not just blood. She is yours now. Not your empire. Not your revenge. Her.”
Dominic said nothing.
“Promise me you won’t make her into you.”
He wanted to promise. For Clara, he wanted to become any kind of man she needed in that moment.
But Dominic had built a life on ugly truths.
“I don’t know how to be anything else.”
Clara’s eyes filled again, but this time she smiled.
“Then learn.”
The monitor stuttered.
Miller stepped forward. “Dom—”
Clara squeezed Dominic’s fingers with almost no strength.
“She likes stories,” she breathed. “But not princesses. She says princesses wait too much.”
Dominic let out something that almost became a laugh and almost became a sob.
“What does she like?”
“Dogs,” Clara whispered. “And pancakes. And the color blue.”
Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling.
“Tell her I didn’t leave her.”
Dominic leaned closer. “Clara.”
“Tell her,” she said, breath breaking, “I sent her home.”
Then the monitor screamed.
A single flat line.
Doc Miller moved. Paulie cursed from the corner. Dominic did not move at all.
He kept his hand over Clara’s until her skin began to cool.
For ten seconds, he listened to the sound.
Then he stepped back.
“Put her somewhere cold,” he said.
His voice had no life in it.
Paulie followed him into the hall. “Dom.”
Dominic walked past him.
“Dom, listen to me.”
Dominic did not stop.
He went to the armory.
The room smelled of gun oil and metal. Rifles lined the walls. Ammunition sat in labeled drawers. Dominic pulled a black duffel from beneath the steel table and began loading magazines.
One.
Two.
Three.
Paulie came in behind him.
“You hit Rossi tonight, you die.”
Dominic slammed a magazine into a rifle. “Get the men.”
“No.”
Dominic turned slowly.
Paulie had said no to him only once before, fifteen years ago, and Dominic had broken his nose for it.
“Say that again,” Dominic said.
Paulie stood his ground. “No.”
The silence sharpened.
“Rossi has fifty men around that Staten Island compound,” Paulie said. “You go there with grief in your eyes and guns in your hands, you don’t come back. And when you die, who protects the kid upstairs?”
Dominic’s fingers tightened around the rifle.
Paulie stepped closer. “You want Victor? You’ll get him. You want Rossi? I’ll help you bury him myself. But not like this. Not stupid. Not tonight.”
Dominic’s rage shook through him.
Then a small voice came from the doorway.
“Are you going to die?”
Mia stood in the hall wearing an oversized blue sweater, her damp hair combed flat, her face scrubbed clean for the first time in years.
She looked smaller without the dirt.
Younger.
More breakable.
Dominic lowered the rifle.
Mia looked at the weapons on the table, then back at him.
“The man with melted skin said if we left, men would shoot us.”
Dominic set the rifle down.
The sound echoed like a door closing.
He walked to Mia and crouched in front of her.
“No,” he said. “I am not going to die tonight.”
“Are you going to shoot him?”
Dominic could have lied.
He didn’t.
“Yes,” he said. “But not tonight.”
Mia studied him.
“Then what happens tonight?”
Dominic looked at Paulie. Then at the guns. Then at the child Clara had kept alive by letting herself die.
“Tonight,” he said, “you sleep in a warm bed.”
Part 3
Dominic did not sleep.
Neither did Mia.
At two in the morning, Helen found the girl sitting cross-legged outside the medical wing with a blanket around her shoulders and a plastic cup of water untouched beside her.
“She won’t move,” Helen told Dominic.
Dominic came down the hall in shirtsleeves, the violence of the armory washed from his hands but not from his eyes.
Mia looked up.
“Is Mama awake?”
Dominic stopped.
No war, no commission meeting, no federal indictment, no gun at his throat had ever frightened him like that question.
He sat on the floor across from her because he did not know what else to do.
“No,” he said.
Mia stared at him.
“She’s sleeping?”
Dominic looked down at his hands.
“No.”
The hallway seemed too bright. Too quiet.
Mia did not cry at first. She watched his face, searching for the trick, the bargain, the hidden cost. When she found none, something in her folded.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Dominic reached toward her, then stopped.
Mia crawled into his lap on her own.
He froze.
Her body was so light. Her grief came without noise, just shaking, breathless and endless. Dominic held her awkwardly, one hand on her back, the other hovering before finally settling over her hair.
“She told me to tell you something,” he said.
Mia’s fingers clutched his shirt.
“She said she didn’t leave you.”
Mia shook harder.
“She said she sent you home.”
That broke the sound loose.
Mia cried like a child for the first time since Dominic had met her.
And Dominic Vale, who had made grown men weep in basements, sat on a marble floor until dawn while his daughter cried into his chest.
By morning, the house had changed.
Not visibly. The lawns were still perfect. The guards still patrolled. The kitchen still gleamed.
But everybody inside it knew something had shifted.
Dominic did not go to Staten Island.
He went to war without firing a shot.
First, he moved Mia into the blue room near the garden. Helen filled the closet with clothes, none of which Mia trusted at first. She slept under the bed the first two nights, curled like an animal in hiding, until Dominic stopped telling her to get out and simply placed a blanket there.
On the third night, she climbed into the bed.
On the fourth, she asked for pancakes.
Dominic burned the first batch.
Mia stared at the black edges. “Do rich people eat them like this?”
“No,” Dominic said.
“Then why are they like that?”
“Because I’m bad at pancakes.”
She considered that. “Mama was bad too.”
Dominic slid the plate toward her. “Then it runs in the family.”
Mia looked at him sharply, suspicious of the word family, but she ate two pancakes anyway.
While Mia learned what warmth felt like, Dominic dismantled Marco Rossi’s world piece by piece.
He did not storm the compound. He did not spray bullets across marble floors. He did not give Rossi the dramatic war he expected.
He made phone calls.
He bought debts.
He flipped captains.
He sent photographs of the Jersey munitions plant to men who cared more about leverage than loyalty. He found city inspectors Rossi had paid off and paid them more to remember their conscience. He located Victor’s storage unit in Newark and emptied it before Victor knew it had been found.
Inside were records.
Payments.
Medical logs.
Photographs of Clara in the factory, taken like proof of life and proof of control.
And one handwritten note from Rossi to Victor.
Keep the woman alive until the child is born. After that, decide what is useful.
Paulie read the note and crossed himself.
Dominic said nothing.
His silence scared Paulie more than rage ever had.
The final move came two weeks after Clara’s funeral.
Dominic buried her at a small cemetery near the water in Brooklyn, beneath her real name, not the false one Rossi had forced onto her life. Only four people stood at the grave: Dominic, Mia, Helen, and Paulie.
Mia wore a navy coat and held the gold ring that had hung from her mother’s neck.
Dominic had tried to take it once, to keep it safe.
Mia had looked at him and said, “No.”
He had not asked again.
At the grave, she placed the ring on the casket.
Then she changed her mind, snatched it back, and pressed it to her chest.
Dominic pretended not to see.
That night, Rossi summoned the commission.
Old men came in dark coats to a private club on Staten Island, a place with velvet booths, red wine, and no windows. They expected Dominic to arrive angry. They expected threats. They expected blood.
He came alone.
No rifle.
No visible gun.
Just a black suit, tired eyes, and a folder under one arm.
Marco Rossi sat at the head of the table, white-haired and thin-lipped, with Victor standing behind him. The left side of Victor’s neck shone pink and melted under the chandelier light.
Rossi smiled.
“Dominic,” he said. “We hear you’ve had a difficult month.”
Dominic looked at Victor first.
Victor’s smile twitched.
Then Dominic looked at Rossi.
“You locked Clara Whitmore in a toxic factory for six years.”
The room went still.
Rossi sighed like a disappointed father. “Careful.”
“You poisoned her. You poisoned my child.”
Several men shifted in their seats.
Rossi’s eyes hardened. “You have no proof.”
Dominic placed the folder on the table.
“No,” he said. “I have copies.”
Rossi’s smile faded.
Dominic opened the folder. Photographs slid across the polished wood. Payment records. Inspection reports. Victor’s signature. Rossi’s note.
One by one, the old men at the table looked down.
Then they looked at Rossi.
Rossi understood before anyone spoke. The commission did not care about Clara. They did not care about a child. They cared that Rossi had hidden a living bargaining chip from them for six years. They cared that he had poisoned a blood heir without permission. They cared that he had been sloppy enough to leave evidence.
Dominic leaned forward.
“I sent copies to every captain you underpaid, every federal agent you bought, and every widow whose husband disappeared after speaking your name. At sunrise, they become public unless I make a call.”
Rossi stood. “You think paperwork saves you?”
“No,” Dominic said. “But greed does.”
The door behind Rossi opened.
Two of Rossi’s own men stepped inside.
Victor reached for his gun.
Paulie appeared behind him and pressed a pistol to the base of his skull.
“Don’t,” Paulie said.
Victor froze.
Rossi looked around the room and saw what Dominic had spent two weeks building.
Not an attack.
A collapse.
His captains had sold him. His allies had stepped back. His secrets had become currency.
Dominic stood.
“I wanted to kill you in front of everybody,” he said. “I wanted Mia to know the man who hurt her mother died afraid.”
Rossi’s face twisted. “Then do it.”
Dominic stared at him for a long time.
Then he shook his head.
“No.”
Even Paulie looked surprised.
Dominic’s voice dropped. “That would make her first inheritance from me a body count.”
Rossi laughed once, sharp and bitter. “You’ve gone soft.”
“No,” Dominic said. “I’ve become patient.”
By dawn, Marco Rossi was gone from the city in handcuffs delivered through channels he had once controlled. His financial ledgers reached federal investigators. His captains turned on each other. Victor Sane disappeared into a prison intake system with enemies on both sides of the bars.
Dominic did not pull the trigger.
For Mia, that mattered.
Not right away. At six years old, she did not understand indictments, commissions, leverage, or why men who once bowed to Dominic now avoided saying his name.
But she understood he came home.
Every night.
Sometimes late. Sometimes silent. Sometimes with blood on his cuff that was not his.
But he came home.
And slowly, the mansion stopped feeling like a cage.
Spring arrived in Long Island with white flowers along the garden wall. Mia gained weight. Her hair grew shiny. She learned to read with Helen at the kitchen island and learned to make pancakes better than Dominic by April.
One morning, Dominic found her outside near the fountain, crouched beside a muddy stray dog that had slipped through the hedges.
“Don’t touch that,” he said. “It could bite.”
Mia looked up. “So could I.”
Dominic stared at her.
Then, despite himself, he laughed.
It startled both of them.
Mia smiled a little, then looked back at the dog. “Can we keep him?”
“No.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
That was suspicious.
By dinner, the dog was asleep in her room.
Dominic stood in the doorway and looked at the animal, then at Mia pretending to read.
“I said no.”
“You also said everything in this house belongs to you,” Mia said. “So now he’s your dog.”
Dominic looked at the ceiling.
“What’s his name?”
“Hound.”
Of course it was.
That night, after Mia fell asleep with Hound curled at her feet, Dominic walked into his study and opened the safe.
Inside lay his gold ring.
The two-headed hound caught the lamplight.
He had worn it for fifteen years as a symbol of power. Men feared it. Men kissed it. Men died after seeing it.
Now he saw only Clara’s hand closing around its twin.
Mia appeared at the doorway in her pajamas.
“You’re not supposed to be awake,” he said.
“Neither are you.”
He closed the safe halfway. “Bad dream?”
She nodded.
He waited.
“In the dream, we were still in the box,” she said. “Mama told me to run, but I couldn’t find the door.”
Dominic’s chest tightened.
“You’re not there anymore.”
“I know.” Mia looked at the ring. “But sometimes my head doesn’t know.”
Dominic crossed the room and knelt in front of her.
“Mine doesn’t either.”
She studied him.
“Do you miss her?”
Every day, he thought.
Every hour.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you miss her more because of me?”
Dominic frowned. “What?”
Mia’s eyes dropped. “Because I look like her.”
Dominic felt something inside him crack open, not violently this time, but quietly, like ice beginning to melt.
He reached for her slowly. She allowed it.
“You do look like her,” he said. “But you are not a wound, Mia.”
She blinked.
“You are what she saved.”
Mia’s mouth trembled.
Then she stepped into his arms.
Dominic held her better now. Not perfectly. But better.
Years later, people would tell different stories about why Dominic Vale changed.
Some said prison scared him. Others said the commission weakened after Rossi fell and Dominic simply became more strategic. A few whispered that the ghost of Clara Whitmore haunted the Long Island estate and dragged the devil out of him piece by piece.
None of them knew about the little girl in the yellow jacket.
They did not know that the most feared man in New York learned how to braid hair from a YouTube video at midnight.
They did not know he burned pancakes six Sundays in a row before getting them right.
They did not know he stopped wearing his ring because his daughter once asked if power always had to be heavy.
And they did not know that every November, Dominic took Mia to a quiet Brooklyn cemetery, where she placed blue flowers on her mother’s grave and told Clara everything.
About school.
About Hound.
About Helen’s terrible singing.
About Paulie teaching her poker and then pretending not to lose.
About Dominic trying, failing, and trying again.
On Mia’s seventh birthday, Dominic brought her to the garden behind the estate. The fountain had been turned off for winter, and the air smelled like salt from the Sound.
He handed her a small velvet box.
Mia opened it carefully.
Inside was not a ring.
It was a necklace with a small gold charm shaped like a two-headed hound.
Mia touched it with one finger. “Is this Mama’s?”
“No,” Dominic said. “Your mother’s ring is yours when you’re ready. This one is new.”
“Why two heads?”
Dominic looked toward the water.
“One looks back,” he said. “So it remembers.”
Mia waited.
“And one looks forward,” he continued. “So it doesn’t get trapped there.”
Mia held the charm in her palm.
Then she looked up at him. “Are we good people now?”
Dominic could have lied.
He still had enemies. Still had sins. Still had nights when the dark inside him felt familiar enough to call home.
But he also had a child waiting at the breakfast table.
A child who knew the truth and still reached for his hand.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we’re trying.”
Mia nodded like that answer made sense.
Then she slipped her small hand into his.
For once, Dominic Vale did not feel the weight of an empire.
He felt the warmth of a child who had crossed through poison, hunger, fear, and death, and still somehow believed tomorrow could be different.
Behind them, the mansion glowed with soft yellow light.
Ahead of them, the garden path curved toward the sea.
And for the first time in his life, Dominic did not look back at the darkness and mistake it for home.
THE END
