Everyone Had a Key but Me novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: What the Don Owes

Gabe's POV

Before I answered the Table, I went to the flour room behind the ovens, which had no window.

Dario's men had put Bruno on an upturned crate under a bare bulb, and he sat with his hands on his knees and looked up at me, calm.

Dario held out a pistol, butt first.

"The Table won't stop you," he said. "Two of them would thank you."

I looked at the gun.

My father would have taken it.

He had put a man in the river for less, when I was nine, and I had watched from the back seat of the car.

I had spent thirty years learning that this was what the chair was for.

"Leave us," I said.

Dario didn't move.

"Cousin."

He put the pistol on a shelf of flour sacks, a long way from either of us, and went out and shut the door.

Bruno looked at me, flat and sure.

"You won't," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I pulled you out of the East River when you were twelve and you couldn't swim."

"I remember."

"Because I taught you to drive in your mother's Buick. Because I carried your father's coffin on my left shoulder."

"I remember that, too."

His certainty faltered.

"Then why?" he said, and for the first time he sounded like the boy I had grown up with. "I was always the one who was there. Always. Even when your father didn't see me, I was there, and you gave my sister a seat and my ledgers a signature and I got a handshake. Two years. You never once asked if I was tired."

"You sold my father's friends."

"I sold what nobody was guarding."

"You tried to hang it on the one person in my life who never touched a thing that was mine."

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