Chapter 20: Call It In

Gianna's POV

The speakers clicked.

The big screen above the altar, which had been showing a slow slideshow of Stefano and Lidia on a boat, went black.

Then a message thread filled it, white letters on a dark ground.

Chicago's debt keeps paying.

Four hundred people read it at once.

"What is this?" Stefano said. He swung around to the sound desk. "Turn that off."

The man from the hotel did not move. Lidia, in her ivory dress, did not move either.

"Turn it off!"

A man's voice came out of every speaker in the ballroom.

It was Stefano's, warm and lazy, and it was laughing.

"It is a good story," it said. "My grandmother knelt over me, and she said, Tell him you carried him."

The room went so quiet I could hear the flowers on the arch drip water.

"Chicago has been paying my family for five years," said the voice. "It is the best money we ever made."

Stefano lunged for the stand and tore the cable out.

The recording ran on.

It came from the speakers along the walls, and the speakers at the back.

"Your father saw what it was worth," Stefano's own voice said, from everywhere.

"He put his name to it on the first day."

Salvatore, in the front row, rose to his feet.

His face had gone gray.

"This is a fake," Stefano shouted. "A fabrication, made by the Chicago woman."

"Stefano," his grandmother said.

"It is a lie, Nonna. Tell them!"

"Sit down," Mrs. Sartori said, and he heard her tone, and he shut his mouth.

The recording stopped.

I stood at the altar with my hand still out for the microphone.

Nobody in the hall had breathed.

"There is a man here who can say what is true," I said.

"He is in the third row."

Heads turned.

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