Chapter 21: No

The family door was a steel door in an alley behind the courthouse, with a row of black cars waiting outside.

My father walked me through it with his hand on my shoulder, and the cameras never saw us.

"Go and see him," he said at the curb.

"Papa?"

"You'll sit awake tonight if you don't."

He opened the car door himself.

"Say what you came to say."

Giacomo drove.

He did not ask where I was going, and he did not speak the whole way to the hospital.

When I got out, he put his hand on the car roof and said only one thing.

"I'll be here."

Gabriel's room was on the sixth floor, with an agent on a chair outside it.

He lay propped on four pillows with a tube in his chest and his right arm strapped across his chest.

He had lost ten pounds in two days, and his famous jaw looked sharp enough to cut.

"You came," he said.

"I brought a lawyer's papers."

I laid the envelope on the tray table, over the plastic cup of ice chips.

He looked at it for a long time.

"Before you say it," Gabriel said, "let me say something first."

"Say it."

"I know what I'm not owed." His voice was thin. "I'm not asking you to come home."

"I don't have a home. I'm asking you to let me try to deserve you."

"No."

"Nina..."

"That's the answer, Gabriel. It's no."

He shut his eyes.

A tear ran down into his ear.

"Is it him?" he asked. "The driver."

"He isn't my driver, and you know it."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Don's Daughter He Left to Bleed from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.