After My Four Childhood Friends Abandoned Me, I Inherited a Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Sentence

Nobody fired.

Thirteen guns pointed across the scarred table, and every man holding one waited for somebody else to move first.

I stood up from the bench, and I did it slowly.

"Captain," I said.

He didn't look at me.

He was looking at his son, and the shotgun had stopped halfway to his shoulder.

"You heard," I said. "He told me about the bottle in the pharmacy and the Thursday pill. Did you know?"

I watched the old man's face.

I had watched it at my grandfather's will, and at the club, and on the berth, and I knew every pause it had.

This pause was a new one.

It was long, and it was not the pause of a man deciding how to lie.

"Papa," Ettore said, lightly. "Don't listen to her. The Lucchesis have been trying to put us in the ground for forty years."

"Did you put that pill in his bottle?"

"Papa."

"Did you?"

Ettore opened his mouth and for the first time I could see him choose, and he chose too slowly.

The old captain's shotgun came down.

It came down until the barrel pointed at the stone floor.

"Ottavio fed me at his table," the old man said, in a cracked voice. "When my wife died, he sat with me. I wanted the yard, and I'd have fought him for it, but I'd never..."

He turned to the men at his back.

"Put them down," he said. "All of you. Put them down."

They did, one at a time, and the captains' men took the guns.

Ettore stood alone by the stove with the pistol in his hand.

"Fine," he said. His voice shook. "Fine. All of you. The old man made a slow girl and a driver's son into the family, and I did the family a favor."

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