My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Bay Ridge

Seven captains put their hands on her father's table, Dario offers to keep her as wife with Lidia in the guest house, and at dawn he freezes every Sartori account while Lidia posts her scan.

Nino drove me to Bay Ridge himself, with the six other captains following in three cars.

My father's house had been dark since his funeral.

Nino unlocked the front door with a key he had carried for three years and never given back.

"Alberto told me to keep it," he said. "In case his girl came home."

I stood in the hall in my black dress, with no ring and no coat.

The captains filed into the living room and stood around my father's long table without sitting down.

Nobody spoke until I did.

"Why did you stand up?"

Nino rested his weight on his good leg.

"Because we swore to the Balestra table for Alberto's daughter," he said. "We never swore for Dario. He knows that. He forgot it tonight."

An old captain nodded from the window.

"Seven crews, Gemma. Every one of us follows your father's blood."

"Then follow it now," I said. "I want the docks, the laundromats and the widows' fund back under my name."

The room went still.

"Dario will starve us for it," Nino said. "He pays our men."

"Not with his money," I said. "He pays them with the Sartori routes, and I signed those over to him myself."

Nobody smiled.

I knew what I was asking. A woman had never held that table.

"Give me ninety days," I said.

One by one, they put a hand flat on my father's table.

Nino put his down last.

I made coffee in my father's kitchen at midnight, because I did not know what else to do with my hands.

At two in the morning headlights swept across the front window.

Dario came up the steps alone.

He did not knock. He used the key he had been given when we married, and I realized I had never taken it back.

"Gem."

He stood in the hall in the same navy suit, with a bottle of my father's brandy under his arm.

"Take that out of my house."

"This is my house too. I paid the property tax on it for three years."

He set the brandy on the hall table and spread his hands.

"Listen to me. You were right, all right? There. You were right about all of it."

I said nothing.

"Come home," he said. "You stay my wife. You keep the name, the house on the island, the Sunday table. Lidia moves into the guest house."

I looked at him.

"You want me to live next to her."

"She's carrying my child, Gem. She stays under my roof. I'm not asking you to like it."

Behind me, a floorboard creaked.

Nino stood in the kitchen doorway with his hand inside his coat.

Dario did not look at him.

"A Don's wife does not leave," he said, softer now. "You know what happens to a woman who tries."

"What happens, Dario?"

"She comes back. They always come back."

"I'm not your wife," I said.

"The priest says you are."

"The priest didn't hear the recording."

His jaw moved.

"Then say it, and I'll go. Where does your money come from tomorrow? Everything you have is mine."

I picked up my father's brandy, walked past him and opened the front door.

"Get out of my father's house."

He took the bottle back out of my hands.

"By morning," he said, "you'll be begging."

He went down the steps.

Nino closed the door and locked it with his own key.

I did not sleep.

At dawn I sat on the stairs with a cold cup of coffee and watched the light come up in the hall.

Nino's phone buzzed in the kitchen.

Then another phone buzzed in the living room. Then a third.

He came back in with his face grey.

"Payroll didn't clear," he said. "Dario froze every Sartori account at six this morning. Our men aren't getting paid today."

"How many men?"

"Three hundred and twelve."

I put the cup down.

That was exactly what he thought I would do. I would wait for him to open the door again.

"Then let's go and get paid another way," I said.

Nino started to answer, and my own phone buzzed on the step beside me.

It was the Balestra wives' group chat, the one I had been added to on my wedding day and never been able to leave.

Forty-one women had already seen the message.

It was a black-and-white photograph, a small curled shape inside a dark circle.

Under it, a single line from Lidia's number: "Our little Balestra. Eight weeks. Pray for us."

Nobody had typed a word under it yet.

Then my mother-in-law sent a heart.

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