Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Ferryman's Rules

The Ferryman's rules arrive, Leni comes by the shop furious that her brother asked, and Lucio walks in with coffee to announce he's spending the whole week at Roxie's side.

I stood on the sidewalk with a stolen phone against my skin.

My heart was going like a hammer on sheet tin.

"I pawned my dad's watch," I said.

"At midnight."

"The old man keeps hours for people like me."

Lucio looked past me at the pawnshop door.

The gold balls my father painted hung over it, dull under the streetlight.

"Get in, Rox."

I got in, because not getting in was a question I couldn't answer.

The car smelled like leather and cold espresso.

A pistol sat in the door pocket on his side.

He drove the three blocks to my shop without saying a word.

He didn't ask what the watch got me.

He didn't ask why I'd needed money four hours after he wired me two million dollars.

He pulled up outside Kinnard Neon and left the engine running.

"Lock the door behind you."

"I always lock the door."

"Lock it anyway."

I went up the back stairs to my apartment over the shop.

His headlights stayed on my window until the lamp was lit.

Then they slid away down Atwells.

I looked down at my wrist.

My father's watch was on it.

It had been on it the whole drive, ticking against the seatbelt where he could see it.

The burner buzzed at two in the morning.

I sat up so fast I knocked the lamp over.

These are the rules.

One. Cash. Two hundred thousand dollars, left with the old man by Thursday.

Two. You tell no one. Not a friend, not a priest, not your mother.

Three. No goodbyes. A goodbye is how they find you.

Four. Leave everything. Your phone, your cards, your name.

Five. The ride leaves on the morning of the seventh day. You will learn where the night before.

I read it three times.

Then I typed: That's it?

One more. Do not lie to me. I will know.

I almost laughed.

I'd lied to the Don of Federal Hill an hour ago, and he'd let me.

How do I know you're real? I typed.

You do not. Go to sleep.

On Monday morning I walked into the bank on the corner and asked for two hundred thousand dollars in cash.

The manager asked twice if everything was all right.

Nobody on the Hill asks that a third time.

By noon I had it in a gym bag under the workbench, under a coil of transformer wire.

At four o'clock the shop bell rang.

Leni came in gray to the lips, fresh tape on her forearm over the fistula.

She'd come straight from the dialysis chair.

She always did.

She said my shop was the only place on the Hill that didn't smell like Rhonda's perfume or her brother's money.

She wasn't wrong about either.

"He asked you," she said.

She didn't say hello.

"He actually sat you down in Dad's study and asked you."

"He did."

"I told him no. I told him I'd rather go on the list and wait like a normal person with a normal brother."

She dropped onto the stool by my bench and stole half my sandwich.

"He says you named a price."

"I did."

"How much?"

"Two million and the building."

Leni stared at me.

Then she laughed so hard she had to hold her side where the bad kidneys were.

"Good," she said. "Make him bleed. He's never paid for anything in his life without a man in a car outside."

I picked up a length of clear tube and turned it over the torch.

It went soft and orange in the flame.

"Make me something," Leni said. "Before Saturday. Something stupid."

"Like what?"

"A pink pig. A martini glass. Something Rhonda would hate."

I bent the glass into the first curve of an L.

She watched my hands the way she always watched them.

"Roxie."

"Mm."

"If you do this, I'll never forgive you."

The glass hissed against the wet sponge.

"And if you don't do it, I'll never forgive him for asking."

I wanted to tell her.

I wanted to put the torch down and tell her I'd already died for her once.

Rule two sat in my bra like a stone.

"Eat the rest of the sandwich," I said instead.

She ate it, and called me a tyrant with her mouth full.

At nine that night I carried the gym bag down Atwells.

The old man didn't count it.

He zipped it into the guitar case and went back to his racing form.

On Tuesday morning at seven, the shop bell rang again.

I came down the stairs in a tank top with a toothbrush in my mouth.

Lucio stood inside my door in a charcoal suit, holding two paper cups of coffee.

He held one out.

"Black, two sugars. Right?"

Nobody had ever told him that.

He'd watched it across ten years of Sunday tables.

"What are you doing here?"

"I've taken the week off."

"Dons don't take weeks off."

"This one does."

He set my coffee on the workbench, right above the spot where the gym bag had sat.

"Nothing happens to you before Saturday, Rox. So I'm going wherever you go."

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