Chapter 7: The Count House

The Balestra count house was the back room of a tire shop on Richmond Avenue, and I had been inside it exactly once, on my wedding night.

Dario had shown me the room as a gift.

"My wife should know where the money sleeps," he had said.

Thursday night, at eleven, I walked to the shop's side door with a box of my father's favorite pastries and knocked three times.

An old woman opened it.

She had counted money for Dario's father and for Dario, and she had sat beside me at my own wedding.

"Gemma," she said, and held a hand to her chest. "They told us you went mad."

"Have I?"

She looked at the box, then at me.

"Alberto's cannoli," she said. "God forgive me."

She stepped aside.

Santino came in behind me with six dock men, silent in their rubber boots.

The room was long and bright, with four counting tables and a steel cage along the back wall.

Inside the cage, stacked on shelves, was every cent Dario had collected that week.

"A million four," the old woman whispered. "Counted since Monday. His men come for it Friday morning."

"Not this Friday," Santino said.

I held the cage key in my hand, the one Dario had given me, and never asked for back.

It turned.

The dock men loaded the cash into duffel bags without a word.

I carried the ledger myself.

"You only take half," the old woman said suddenly. "Leave him half and he'll think it's a thief. Take all of it and he'll know it's you."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.