Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: First Client

I walked out of the garden with the phone in my hand.

Behind me Leni was still standing on her chair.

Nobody noticed me go except Lucio, and Bunny, who notices everything.

I stood in the old Don's study with the door shut.

The fig tree scraped the window, the way it had in May.

The answer came in under a minute.

My husband. He says if I leave he'll find me. He's a cop.

I sat down in the leather chair in front of the desk.

The same chair.

Lucio came in and shut the door and leaned on it.

He didn't come closer.

"She says her husband's a cop," I said.

"Then she's the kind my father took first."

"What do I say?"

"Whatever you'd have wanted to read."

I typed slowly.

Understood. He will not find you. There is no fare.

Then the rules, all of them, the way they'd come to me at two in the morning over the shop.

Tell no one. No goodbyes. Leave everything.

The last one I wrote differently.

You may ask me anything. I will answer.

Lucio read it over my shoulder.

"My father never let them ask."

"I'm not your father."

"No," he said. "Thank God."

She asked me four things that night.

Was it safe.

Was it far.

Would she have to see anyone.

And whether the Ferryman was a man or a woman.

I looked at that one a long time.

Both, I wrote.

The papers came from the same hands they'd always come from. Lucio had shown me whose, and I'll never write it down.

At four in the morning we parked the black car across Kennedy Plaza, under the dead streetlight.

Same streetlight.

Somebody should have fixed it twenty years ago.

I hoped nobody ever would.

The 5 a.m. bus sat shuddering at the curb.

She was there under the shelter roof in a hooded sweatshirt and sneakers, with one backpack.

She was small and thin and kept her sleeves pulled down over her hands.

She saw our car.

I watched her see it.

I watched her whole body go stiff.

I typed fast.

The black car under the streetlight is mine. You are safe. Do not look at it.

She read it.

She didn't look at it.

Lucio's man walked up beside her in his black hoodie and held out an envelope at hip height.

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