Sold to the Man Who Took Me, but I Hold His Life novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Pike

Declan's POV

The diner on the White Horse Pike had been a diner for forty years and a banquet hall for twenty, and Sal Carbone still ate his eggs in the same corner booth.

I drove up alone on a Tuesday morning in the first week of December.

Sal had sent word the night before, two lines through a driver, and I had not slept.

The old man sat with his cane hooked on the table edge and a plate in front of him he had barely touched.

He was seventy-four and small, in a cardigan under a black suit, with white hair combed flat.

He did not look up.

"Sit," Sal said.

I sat.

A waitress put a coffee in front of me and went away without a word.

"Nine winters," Sal said. "You took the Boards from the last man when you were thirty, and I said, that one's careful. That one doesn't drink on the job. You remember what I said to you at the table?"

"One rule," I said.

"Say it."

"Nobody on the Boardwalk is touched against their will."

"The only thing I ever swore on my family's name." Sal lifted his fork and put it down. "My sister, in nineteen seventy-one. A made man, drunk. I won't say more. But I swore it, and every boss since has sworn it to me, and I've buried two who broke it."

I kept my hands still on the table.

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