My Don Faked His Death to Test Me, So I Died Haunting Him novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Vote

The waiters and the sons went out, and the doors were shut behind them.

Only the heads of the families stayed in the square, and the four men they were about to judge.

Alessio stood where he was. My father and my brothers stood against the wall.

The old man sat back down at the head of the table.

"The Duranti head does not vote on his own house," he said. "The rest of us do."

"Before that," Alessio said, "I ask for one thing."

"You are in no position to ask."

"It is not for me."

The old man waved a hand, and Alessio went on.

"I ask that a chair be set for my wife," he said. "She should have been heard in this room, and she cannot be."

For a moment nobody breathed.

Then Gemma's father stood up, took a chair from the wall, and set it at the open end of the square.

I sat down in it.

I folded my hands in my lap, and the room looked exactly as it had from the floor.

"The old rule," the old man said. "Let it be read."

A man at the end of the table took a card from his coat. It was yellow with age.

"A man who brings death to the women and children of his own house answers with his life," he read. "No court may spare him, and no family may buy him free."

"It has not been used in forty years," said the man from the Hudson family.

"It has not been needed in forty years," the old man said.

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