Never Cross the Mafia Don's Hidden Lover novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Terms

At the Don's lake house Viola sets her terms: she testifies, nobody kills Trent; then Trent goes on the news to say his bride ran off with a lover.

"Then I'm not leaving my grandmother upstairs," I said.

Elio looked at the ceiling.

Above it, Nonna was asleep in the apartment where I grew up, with her teeth in a glass and her cane hooked on the headboard.

"Tino," he said.

Tino sighed and went up the back stairs.

I heard Nonna's voice through the floor, then a crash, then Tino saying, "Signora, please, I'm on your side."

I took the specimen jar off the counter.

Elio held out his good hand for it.

"No," I said.

"That bullet came out of me."

"And it's going into my drug safe, where it stays until a jury sees it."

I locked it in the safe with the ketamine.

"You know men who'd open that with a crowbar," Dina said.

"So do I," Elio said. "That's why she's coming with me."

We left the clinic at 4:20 in the morning.

Nonna rode in front in her housecoat, holding her cane across her knees.

The lake house in Bratenahl was gray stone with a lawn running down to the water.

The lake was the color of a nickel.

Tino put Elio in a bedroom upstairs, and I checked the dressing and his pressure and the color of his lips.

I fell asleep in a chair by his bed.

When I woke up, it was noon, and somebody had put a blanket over me.

My slip was ruined.

There was a black shirt folded on the end of the bed.

It was his.

I put it on over the slip because it was that or a towel.

Downstairs, the kitchen smelled like garlic and onions.

Nonna stood at the stove in her housecoat, frying peppers in a pan she had clearly taken from somebody.

Four of Elio's men sat at the counter eating eggs.

"Sit," Nonna told me. "You look like a ghost."

"Nonna, these are..."

"I know what they are. They eat like they've never seen a mother."

Elio came down the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail.

He'd put on gray trousers and nothing else, and there was a square of my gauze taped under his left collarbone.

He saw me in his shirt.

He stopped on the bottom step for a second too long.

Then he sat down across the table from me.

"Doctor. We need to talk about what happens now."

"Good. I've been thinking about it since four."

"So have I. You stay here. My men watch the clinic. In a week your husband has an accident on the Shoreway."

"No."

Nonna put a plate of eggs in front of him and didn't look up.

"No?" he said.

"No accidents. No Shoreway. Nobody kills Trent."

"He shot me."

"I noticed. I was there for the cleanup."

One of the men laughed and turned it into a cough.

"You heard him," he said to me. "You're his alibi. That means you're the only person alive who can say he wasn't in that ballroom at eleven-forty. He'll kill you for that before he kills me."

"So keep me alive."

"That's what I'm doing."

"No, you're keeping me. That's different."

He leaned back.

He winced, and hid it, and I saw him hide it.

"Here's what I want," I said. "I'm going to testify. In a courtroom, with my name on it. I'm going to put him in a cell for the rest of his life."

"The law," he said, like it was a dish he'd sent back.

"The law. You keep me alive until I get there. And nobody in your family touches him. Not one hair."

"And what do I get?"

"You get to be alive. You were about two minutes from not being, last night."

Elio looked at me for a long moment over his eggs.

"You're asking me to keep alive a man who shot me."

"I'm asking you to let me bury him properly. In a prison."

"And if your jury lets him go?"

"Then you can do whatever you want, and I'll have been wrong."

He picked up his fork.

"I'm never wrong," he said.

"Well, I'm a vet. I've had my hand inside a cow. I can handle you being wrong."

The man who'd laughed choked on his coffee.

Elio put the fork down.

"Fine," he said. "You testify. Nobody touches him. You stay where I can see you."

"I go to work."

"With Tino."

"With Tino," I agreed.

Tino sneezed.

"Your cat," he said bitterly. "It's on my coat."

"He's not my cat. He's the clinic's cat. He has his own chart."

Elio was looking at the shirt again.

At the sleeves pushed up my arms.

I pulled it tighter across my chest.

"It was that or a towel," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it."

The TV on the kitchen wall had been playing the noon news with the sound off.

Nonna picked up the remote and turned it up.

"Viola," she said. "Look."

It was Trent.

He stood outside the Arden in a fresh suit, with his father in his dress uniform beside him, one hand on his shoulder.

Trent's eyes were red.

"My wife left our wedding reception last night," he told the cameras. "She didn't come back. I've learned she left with another man."

The screen cut to a grainy photo from a parking garage.

A woman in a long coat, pushing a laundry cart toward a white van.

A big dark shape climbing into the back of it.

The woman's face was turned toward the camera.

It was mine.

"I'm not angry," Trent said, and his voice cracked beautifully. "I just want her to come home."

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