Reborn as the Mafia King's Wife novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The First Shot

We stood in Ada's hallway while she slept.

Matteo waited for me to answer him.

"I said I loved you to make you lower your guard," I told him.

His face stayed still.

"Part of me meant it. I hated that part."

I had wanted a clean reason for shooting him.

Carlo's lies were not enough to explain my hand.

Matteo had loved me while I was trying to leave.

I had loved him in moments I refused to name.

The gun had made the choice look final.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I know that changes nothing."

"It changes what you tell yourself."

He went downstairs before I could ask him to stay.

I found him an hour later in the cellar under the kitchen.

The man who had come through Ada's kitchen door with a gun sat tied to a chair.

His face was already a different shape.

The young guard stood by the stairs, white to the lips.

Matteo had his sleeves rolled up and blood on his knuckles.

He didn't tell me to go back up.

"Where does Carlo sleep now?" he asked the man.

"I don't know."

Matteo hit him once, almost lazily.

The chair rocked back on two legs and slammed down again.

"He moves," the man gasped. "He eats with old men now. Every night a different table."

"Which old men?"

The man spat blood and said nothing.

Matteo reached for the pliers on the shelf.

"The oldest one," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"The one with the gold ring on his little finger," I said.

"In my first life he stood beside Carlo at your funeral."

"He held Carlo's elbow at the grave like a father."

The man in the chair didn't deny it.

His eyes slid to the floor, and that was all the answer Matteo needed.

Matteo set the pliers down.

He came to me wiping his hands on a rag, and I didn't step back.

"You're not afraid of this," he said.

"I was afraid of the wrong man for two years."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he told the young guard to get the man a doctor and walked me up the stairs with his hand on my back.

At the top he stopped me against the cellar door.

"I should send you to your sister's," he said.

"You won't."

"No. I won't."

His hand slid from my back to my waist and stayed.

"You're mine until you walk out that gate yourself. And I'll make it hard."

"Then make it hard."

I said it to his mouth.

He kissed me there against the door, slow at first and then not slow at all.

I pulled him closer when he started to draw back.

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