I Sent the Mafia Heir to Prison, and He Came Out Wanting Me novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Proof Day
The back kitchen of Archer Bread still had a roof, and that was the only kind thing Ben could say about it.
Everything else was black.
The proofing racks had melted into twisted metal fingers.
The ceiling dripped grey water onto the long steel table.
The front of the shop beyond the swinging door was gone entirely, nothing but a charred hole open to Halsted Street and the pink dawn.
It smelled of wet ash and burnt sugar.
Ben stood in the middle of it with soot to his elbows and did not say anything.
He had been standing there for twenty minutes.
Dario waited by the back door with his coat open, not touching him, giving him room.
"They poured it in through the front window," Dario said finally. "The fire marshal told Greta. Gasoline."
"Your cousin's men."
"My father's."
"Your father's." Ben nodded slowly. "Because I put bread on his table."
"Because you left alive."
Ben crouched and picked up something from the floor.
It was the iron door of the deck oven, bent but whole.
The oven behind it had come through with the steel and the brick, black, wet, standing like a stubborn animal.
"The oven's fine," he said. His voice was strange.
"Ben."
"The starter's fine. It's in the car. My mother's *crock* is in a borrowed Buick in an alley, and it's fine." He laughed, and it broke off halfway. "Look at that. A whole shop, and the one thing I'd go back into a fire for is a jar of flour and water."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Sent the Mafia Heir to Prison, and He Came Out Wanting Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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