I Got Pregnant by My Boss, the Mob Heir, So He Put a Ring on It novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: Smoke Sauna
The red sauna stood at the end of a quarter mile of frozen track, on a shelf of black rock above Lake Superior.
Gio's men stopped at the road.
I walked the rest in the first gray light with the ring in my pocket and the paper note in my fist.
Smoke rose from a stovepipe in a thin straight line.
The building was small and old and painted the color of dried blood, with a low door and one square window fogged on the inside.
Beside it stood a lean-to stacked with split birch to the roof.
I had been inside a smoke sauna once before, as a child, at a church fundraiser in Hermantown.
I remembered the black walls and the smell of old fires and my grandmother's hand on the back of my neck.
I knocked.
The door opened inward before my knuckles landed.
A woman stood in it.
She was fifty-four or fifty-five, with gray-blonde hair in a braid as long as mine, and a wool cardigan over a sauna keeper's apron.
Her forearms were strong and brown.
Her eyes were pale gray.
They were my eyes.
I do not know how I had not seen it, standing in a crowd or at the end of a long shift, glancing up at somebody watching from the dark.
I knew it now the way I knew my own hands.
"Raisa," she said.
She said it in Finnish, with the dialect's soft final vowel, and my grandmother's whole kitchen came back to me.
"You wrote the notes," I said.
"Yes."
"Under my pillow."
"A man in that house takes my money.
"He is old and tired and has a bad leg, and he has been afraid of me for twenty-seven years, and I paid him to go where I could not."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Got Pregnant by My Boss, the Mob Heir, So He Put a Ring on It are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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