He Let Me Die for Her, So I Refused His Ring novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Table Is Set

Silvio Orsini walked up the lawn at midnight between four Corvi guns, with his hands empty and his silver hair still combed straight back.

He had lost his coat somewhere.

Ettore received him in the dining room, at the head of the long table, with thirty-one captains in their chairs and the Corvi men standing along the wall.

I stood behind Adriano's shoulder, because he had asked me to, and my wedding dress was still ruined.

Silvio looked at the room and nodded to it.

"Don Santoro," he said. "I'd like to propose terms."

"You may sit," said Ettore.

"I'll stand."

"You will sit. A man who walks up my lawn without a gun may sit at my table."

Silvio sat.

He folded his hands on the wood, and I saw that they were not entirely steady.

"I came because there has been a misunderstanding," he said. "A young man of mine got ahead of himself."

"The man with the burned ear," Adriano said.

"Yes. Impulsive."

"He's dead on my wife's greenhouse floor."

"Then he paid for it." Silvio spread his hands. "I'll offer you peace on better terms than you deserve. Brooklyn to the Narrows, to the Corvis. The Santoros keep the Manhattan docks. Orsini keeps what it has. A truce, with a marriage in a year."

Nobody laughed. That was worse.

"You're offering me what you offered me on a pier," Adriano said. "In exchange for my staying home."

"I'm offering you a living, boy."

"No."

"I haven't finished."

"You have," said Ettore.

Silvio's smile did not move.

"My men are in the Fifth Avenue hotel as we speak," he said. "Forty of them, with the manager's keys. If I don't walk out of here by one, they begin."

I went cold.

The Santoro hotel.

The pavement. The cold stone. The fourth-floor nursery.

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