Mafia Princess Returns novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Window

Locked in her room, she breaks a lamp on Piero's head, climbs out over the roof, and knocks on her disgraced brother's door.

They put me in my old bedroom on the second floor and locked the door from the outside.

My father's two men took the hall chairs, one on each side.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the silk dress and made myself breathe.

The room had not changed since I was sixteen.

My mother's saint stood on the dresser, a ceramic Saint Anthony with a chipped nose.

It looked small now.

I had one clear thought, and it was a plan.

My brother Enrico was alive tonight, and in three weeks he would not be.

The man who ordered it would hold my hand at the funeral.

I was not going to be in this house when the wedding came.

At midnight the key turned.

Piero stepped in and closed the door behind him.

He still wore the tuxedo, with the tie pulled loose, and he looked tired and almost sorry.

"That was a stupid thing to do, amore."

I stood up from the bed.

"Your father let me come up," he said. "He thinks you need to hear it from me."

He walked toward me with his hands open.

"I'll forgive tonight. You apologize at breakfast, in front of everyone, and we put it behind us."

"No."

"You don't understand. Your father needs this."

His hand rose and found the back of my neck.

His thumb pressed, and the old fear moved through my legs.

It lasted exactly one heartbeat.

Then I remembered the bathroom floor, and the fear turned into something that had edges.

I picked up the Saint Anthony off the dresser with my free hand and hit him with it as hard as I could.

The ceramic broke against his temple.

Piero made a small, surprised sound and sat down on the carpet.

He didn't fall all the way.

He put one hand to his head and looked at the blood on his fingers.

"You," he said.

"Not here, amore," I said. "Where nobody can see."

I took the scissors from my vanity.

For eight years he had used my hair to steer me around a room.

I gathered it in my fist at my collarbone and cut straight through, and the long honey-colored rope fell onto his knees.

He stared up at it.

Then he stared at me.

I pulled the money clip out of his jacket pocket, thumbed through eleven hundred dollars, and put it in my bra.

I opened the window and climbed onto the porch roof.

The guards in the hall never heard a thing.

I came down the trellis in a silk dress and bare feet with my heart slamming.

I ran down the dark drive past the cars with their drivers asleep.

At the gate a man was smoking.

I walked straight at him with my chin up like I owned the place, which at that moment I did.

"Daddy said I could go home," I told him. "Open the side gate."

He opened the side gate.

The S53 bus took forty minutes to cross the Verrazzano Bridge.

I sat in the back in the ruined dress, with my short hair stuck to my face and my feet bleeding on the floor.

Nobody looked at me.

That was the best feeling I'd had in eight years.

Bay Ridge was dark and wet when I got off on Third Avenue.

The bakery had a green awning, and the lights were off behind the glass.

I went around the side to the iron stair and climbed to the apartment above.

I knocked with my fist three times.

The door opened on a chain, and the barrel of a gun came through the gap.

"Go home, Fabiola," said my brother.

He was twenty-four.

He had a broken nose, a scar through one eyebrow, and a face that had been beaten and never allowed to rest.

I had last seen it in a coffin.

"Rico."

"I'm not letting you in. If Papa finds out you came here, he'll finish me."

"He's going to anyway."

His jaw tightened.

"I'm only going to say this once, so listen. On Saturday, October thirty-first, three men walk you onto the Narrows pier at night."

"They put your own belt around your ankles and they put you in the water."

The gun didn't move.

"They find you on Sunday," I said. "Everyone calls it a suicide because you lost your standing and your name."

"Who told you that?"

"Piero did. Years from now, in bed, laughing."

Something happened in his face that I will remember until I die a second time.

The gun came down slowly.

"Years from now," my brother said.

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