Mafia Heir Turns Me Gay novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: Orange Peel
Mickey gave Mandy the bar.
"Twenty minutes," he told her.
"Take forty," she said. "Take the year. Go."
The barback saluted him with an ice scoop.
Santino went up the back stairs ahead of Mickey, through the flat, to the hatch over the kitchen.
He climbed the ladder and pushed it open, and snow fell down on both of them.
The roof of Heffernan's was flat and white and empty.
An old lawn chair. A TV antenna from 1980. Mickey's father's empty Old Style cans, still lined up along the parapet, frozen to the tar.
North of them the whole city stood up out of the dark.
The Loop was lit.
Somewhere in the middle of it, forty-one floors up, there was a bar with a glass wall.
Behind it was an office where a man had once pinned Mickey to a window.
It looked very small from here.
Santino took off his suit jacket and put it over Mickey's shoulders.
"You'll freeze," Mickey said.
"I'm Italian. We don't freeze. We complain."
"You're from Taylor Street."
"Very Italian part of Taylor Street."
Below them, through the roof, they could hear the jukebox and three hundred people trying to sing over it.
Down on Halsted, somebody was already setting off firecrackers.
Santino stood in front of Mickey in the snow in his shirtsleeves and no gloves.
Then he put his hand in his trouser pocket and took something out.
It wasn't a ring.
It was a brass key.
Mickey knew it. He'd set it on a marble island in October and walked away.
"I know what you think about rings," Santino said. "You told a woman to sell one."
"I did."
"So no ring."
He held the key out on his bare palm.
His other hand stayed open at his side.
"This opens the elevator to fifty-two. It always did, going down. I'd like it to open for you going up."
"And this..." He lifted his scarred hand a little. "This is the other thing I've got. It isn't pretty. You've seen it."
"I didn't ask for pretty," Mickey said.
Santino's mouth did the thing at the corner.
"You said that the first time."
"I meant it the first time."
Down in the bar, somebody started the countdown early, and three hundred people told him to shut up.
Mickey looked at the key.
He looked at Santino's hand.
He didn't take either one yet.
"I've got terms," he said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Mafia Heir Turns Me Gay are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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