Chapter 18: What Molly Owed

The driver turned from the doorway, and Molly swung the key ring into his face.

It was a heavy ring with six keys on it, and it split his eyebrow open.

He roared and grabbed her by the coat.

Bianca came off the bed with the dinner plate in both hands.

She broke it across the back of his skull, and he went down on one knee.

"That's for my gnocchi," she said.

I grabbed Molly's wrist and pulled her through the door.

"Back stairs," Molly said. Her breath was fast and wet. "Kitchen, then the yard. He has six men in the cellar, and he's about to bring them up."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Later. Run."

We ran.

The back stairs were narrow and dark and smelled of old onions.

Bianca went down them in her socks, and I came behind her, and Molly came last with the driver's hand clawing at her ankle.

She kicked it off, and I heard him swear in the dark.

At the bottom, the kitchen light was on.

It was the same kitchen where I had washed cups, and its back door stood open to the yard.

And in the yard, in the light from the porch, stood my husband.

He had four of his father's men behind him and a pistol in his right hand.

Beyond him, along the hedge, a dozen Lupo men had come out of the cellar and the garage and the black cars in the drive.

Nobody had fired.

It was the silence before it.

"Bianca," Sandro said.

She walked out of the kitchen and straight into his chest, and he held her with his gun hand wrapped awkwardly behind her back.

"I'm fine," she said into his coat. "I'm fine. I'm so mad."

"Twenty minutes," he said to me over her head, and his voice shook. "It was nineteen."

"I know."

Then Rocco came around the side of the house.

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