My Mafia Husband Never Filed Our Marriage, So I Walked Out Pregnant novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Rain
In the rain Lena sets her terms and Damian asks for ten days without saying why.
The first drops of rain hit the clerk's steps as Damian got out of the car.
He left the door open and the driver behind it.
He crossed the street without looking at the traffic, and a cab braked and honked and he did not turn his head.
"You followed me," Lena said.
"I've followed you since you left the house."
"That's supposed to make it better?"
"No." He stopped one step below her, so their eyes were level. "I wanted to be the one to tell you about the clerk. You went and heard it from a stranger."
"You had six months to tell me."
"I know."
The rain came harder.
It ran down his hair and into his collar, and he did not move to get out of it.
"Come to the car," he said. "Let me talk to you where it's dry."
"Whose car is it, Damian? Yours, or your grandfather's?"
A muscle moved in his jaw.
"Mine."
"Then you can talk to me here."
She stayed on the step with her paper going soft in her fist.
He looked at it.
"You went to check," he said.
"I went to find out which of my memories I'm allowed to keep."
His face changed.
It was small, only a flinch at the edge of his mouth, but it was the first honest thing she had seen on him since the study.
"All of them," he said. "Every one."
"You put a ring on me in front of my parents."
"Yes."
"You let my mother cry at a wedding that wasn't one."
"Lena."
"You let me tell people at work I was married. I bought a drawer's worth of towels with our initials on them."
"I know."
"Do you? Because I don't think you know the first thing about what you did."
Her voice cracked on the last word.
She hated it.
He lifted one hand.
She expected him to cup her face, the way he always had when she was upset.
She was already set to knock the hand away.
Instead he took her wrist.
Very lightly, with two fingers and his thumb on the inside, where the pulse is.
The touch should have meant nothing.
It was a man holding a woman's arm so a taxi would not clip her, and she was standing a foot from the curb.
But his thumb found the pulse and stopped there.
Her heart gave itself away under it.
She felt him feel it.
Neither of them pulled back.
"You're shaking," he said.
"It's cold."
"You're not cold."
His thumb moved once across the bone.
Heat went up her arm and settled low in her stomach, and she wanted to hit him for it.
She wanted to put her mouth on his throat and bite.
She yanked her wrist free.
"Don't touch me like you have the right."
"I don't have the right," Damian said. "I know that."
"Then hear my terms."
"Your terms."
"You stand in front of people and you file it. A real clerk, a real window, your name on the paper, with witnesses who aren't paid. If you can't do that, never say my name again."
He was silent.
She watched the rain run off his chin.
"Ten days," he said.
"What?"
"Give me ten days. Don't go anywhere alone, and let me put a man on you."
He wiped the rain off his face.
"In ten days I'll tell you everything I can."
"Everything you can."
"Yes."
"That's a lawyer's answer."
"It's the one I have."
"Then I have mine," Lena said.
She went down the steps past him, close enough that her sleeve touched his, and kept going.
"File it or leave me alone."
"Lena, please. There are people who would use you."
"Who? Your grandfather?"
He said nothing.
It was the same silence she had heard through the door, and it lit her up from the inside.
"That's what I thought," she said.
She was halfway down the block, with water in her shoes and her hair stuck flat to her neck.
A silver coupe cut across the lane and stopped at the curb ahead of her.
The passenger window slid down.
A woman leaned across the seat.
She had a sleek black bob, a camel coat and sharp cheekbones.
Lena had seen her only once, in a photograph on Phoebe's phone.
In it she was kissing the cheek of an old man at a charity dinner.
"Get in, Mrs. Karras," Cassandra Pappas said. "I need to talk to you before he catches up."
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