The Mafia Wife's Revenge novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Her Words Back

I ran, and the detective let me reach him.

"He's confessing to something that happened three years ago," the detective said. "He asked me to arrest him before the show was over."

"I know what he did," I said. "I'm the victim."

"Then you can tell the judge in the morning."

I told the judge in the morning.

I stood in a courtroom with a dozen cameras at my back and told him that I did not want Cillian Dunne held.

I said he had given up a crew, a name and a hand to put two killers in front of me.

I said he would testify against Damian Keane and Vernon Lowe, and I wanted him alive to do it.

The prosecutor wrote that down.

Bail was two hundred thousand dollars.

The women of the atelier passed a hat, and the board advanced the rest against my first season's pay.

I signed the bail papers myself, with a hand that nobody was guiding.

He came out of the side door at dusk in the same bloody shirt, with a paper bag of his own belongings.

He stopped three feet from me on the courthouse steps, and he did not step closer.

"You shouldn't have done that," he said.

"You shouldn't have held the knife."

He took it in silence, because it was true.

"Come with me," I said.

The loft over the atelier had been mine when I was twenty-one and too poor for a room.

A bed, a table, a window that looked down on Fifth Avenue, and an old armchair the seamstresses had given me when they found I slept on the floor.

I had not slept there in five years.

Tonight the head seamstress had left a clean sheet on the bed and a lamp on, and she had not asked one question.

Cillian stood in the doorway with his paper bag.

"This isn't forgiveness," I said.

"I know."

"I don't know what it is yet."

"You don't have to."

"Don't tell me what I have to," I said.

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