He Took His Childhood Friend Away, So I Came Back a Mafia Heiress novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Midnight

At a quarter to midnight on my twenty-eighth birthday, I stood at the head of a table I had never sat at, in a room I had never been in.

The five old captains had come in their church suits.

Aurelio had a black book under his arm and the will in a folder, and his hands weren't steady.

The oldest captain had brought a single cannoli with a candle in it.

"It's not much," he said, and put it in front of me. "Your father always said a Rinaldi should eat before she swears."

I laughed, and it came out unsteady.

"Thank you, Don Pasquale," I said, because that was what the others called him.

"Not Don. Just Pasquale. The Don is dead."

"Then I'll eat."

I ate the cannoli with five men watching.

It was the best thing I had tasted in sixteen years.

At midnight Aurelio read the will aloud, every line, in the voice of a man at a funeral.

When he reached my name he stopped, and his chin shook, and he started again.

"Take out the key," Pasquale said.

I laid it on the table.

"Now say what he would have wanted you to say."

I didn't know the words.

I said the ones I had.

"I hold what is Rinaldi for the people who are Rinaldi," I said. "I owe the widows what they were owed. I take nothing from this table that I wouldn't hand back to it."

Pasquale put his three-fingered hand over the key.

"Our captain's daughter," he said.

The other four laid their hands on his.

"Our captain's daughter," they said.

The candle on the cannoli plate went out by itself, and none of us said anything for a minute.

Then Aurelio blew his nose, loudly.

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