The Don's Runaway Substitute novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Wrong Kind of Quiet

Vincenzo's POV

Two blocks from her mother's porch, my phone buzzed with a text from the man I had left at the corner.

Dario's sedan is on her street. He has a pastry box. He is going in.

I pulled over with the taste of her anger still in my mouth.

Fio was at the curb, and two of my men were ten minutes out, and I could not drag my uncle off a porch in front of Allegra's mother.

So I did the only thing Dario had ever felt, and I drove to the harbor.

Mara had called me a dog that got kicked.

She was not wrong.

At the harbor a gray-haired captain and two of my father's old men were waiting beside a container truck with its engine off.

I had called them at five.

Not one of them asked why.

"Dario's shipments," I said. "Every truck, every berth, every account that has his signature on it. Frozen until I say."

The captain looked at me for a long moment.

"He's your uncle."

"He killed Allegra Pozzi."

Nobody moved.

I had said it aloud for the first time in three years, and the words came out much smaller than they had sounded in my head.

The younger of the old men took off his hat.

"I knew the girl," he said. "She brought us coffee at the funeral for your father. Nobody told us she'd gone to Paris, boss. We were just told to stop asking."

"I'm telling you now."

"Then it's done."

It took less than an hour to stop half of Dario's trade.

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