I Hid a Mob Boss in the Stacks, So He Claimed My Nights novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Old Men

Lucio's POV

Zofia called me from the staff lot with the cream card in her hand and read it to me whole.

"Mr. Nunzio Castaldi requests the honor of Miss Zofia Dobrzyn, to say the grace before the Christmas Eve table."

"He wants you standing in front of fifty men," I said.

"Then I'll stand," she said. "You go and find your people."

The baker opened his shop at four, and on Friday I was standing at the back door when he did.

The ovens were already hot.

He did not ask what I wanted.

He gave me an apron, and I tied it, and for a quarter of an hour we shaped dough at the steel table without a word.

Then I said it.

"I can't read," I said. "I never could. I'm learning, and I wanted you to hear it from me and not from him."

The baker went on pressing dough around a tin tube.

"I knew when you were nine," he said.

"You knew."

"Your father came to me with an envelope. He wanted you in my kitchen on Saturdays, frying shells. I asked why. He said, so that nobody asks what the boy does with his afternoons." The old man turned the tube. "You made a good shell. You had the hands for it."

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