The Viper Donna: Stepmother's Mafia Justice novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Bayonne

At Santo's kitchen table she digs out the bullet, sets her rules, and learns Carmine has frozen every account and threatens Nonna's bakery.

I drove with my left foot on the gas and my right hand clamped on Santo's shoulder.

The steering wheel was slick with his blood, and I didn't look at it.

He told me the turns in a flat voice.

Left at the light, across the bridge, then the long dark road into Bayonne.

The children said nothing in the back seat.

Bianca had stopped chewing her rabbit's ear, and Nico had his arm across her like a seat belt.

Santo directed me down a side street of shuttered shops, and then to the back of a narrow building with a faded sign.

LOMBARDI TAILORING, it said, with half the letters gone.

"My mother's," he said. "Nobody comes here. Nobody remembers it."

I cut the engine, and the silence rang.

He got out under his own power, which I would not have bet on.

Upstairs there were two rooms, a kitchen with a yellow table, and a couch under a quilt.

I put Bianca on the couch with the rabbit.

Nico sat on the arm beside her and watched me over her head.

"Is Santo going to die?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"You don't know that."

"I do. I'm stubborn, and I don't allow it."

His mouth twitched in a way that was almost a smile.

Santo sat at the kitchen table with his shirt peeled halfway off.

The bullet had gone in high on his shoulder and stayed there.

Blood ran down his chest in a clean dark line.

I washed my hands at the sink and found a bottle of grappa in a cabinet, a sewing kit, and a pair of long tweezers.

"A hospital would have it out in an hour," he said.

"A hospital would have your name in a computer in ten minutes."

"My father collected debts. His friends didn't go to emergency rooms."

I poured grappa over the tweezers and over the wound.

He hissed through his teeth and gripped the table.

"Talk," I said. "It helps."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Why a man who barely spoke to me for three years drove a car through a gate for me."

He was quiet while I probed.

The tweezers found metal, and his whole body tightened.

"Because I watched you walk into that dining room," he said at last.

"I thought, she's the only one in that house who loves them."

I stopped.

"The children?"

"Both of them."

I drew the bullet out in one pull and dropped it into a saucer with a small, ugly click.

He breathed out a sound that was half curse and half laugh.

"Fine work, Donna."

"Don't call me that."

"What should I call you?"

"Viviana."

"Viviana," he said, and the way he said it was careful, like testing ice.

I threaded a needle and began to sew.

My hands were steady, and I was grateful for that, because the rest of me wasn't.

"I have rules," I said, to the wound instead of the man.

"Tell me."

"You don't lie to me about the children. Not one word, not ever, not to be kind."

Something crossed his face too fast to read.

"Agreed," he said.

"You take my orders about them. Where they sleep, what they eat, who they see."

"Agreed."

"And you don't die in this kitchen, because I'm not explaining the mess to your mother's landlord."

He laughed, and then winced because I'd pulled the thread.

"Agreed," he said, softer. "All of it."

It was too quick, but I let it go.

I tied off the last stitch and wrapped his shoulder in a clean pillowcase from the closet.

When I looked up, he was watching me with an expression I didn't have a name for.

"Vivi," Bianca called from the couch, in the thick voice of a child who is almost asleep. "I'm hungry."

I made plain pasta from a dry box and a jar of tomatoes.

The children ate it with their eyes half shut.

Nico fell asleep sitting up.

I laid him down beside his sister and pulled the quilt over them both.

Then I took out my own phone and opened the banking app, because the habit of three years died hard.

The screen showed a small gray banner.

ACCOUNT RESTRICTED.

I tried the next one, and the next, and each of them said the same thing.

"He froze everything," I said.

"Carmine?"

"My cards, the household accounts, the children's school fund." I laughed. "I have forty dollars in my bag."

"I have some cash," Santo said. "Not much."

"It isn't about money. He wants us to have no way to run."

In the dark corner of the room, Aurelio's second phone began to buzz against my hip.

I took it out.

The screen said CARMINE in plain white letters, and it was unlocked now, as if it had been waiting.

Santo and I looked at each other.

I answered it and said nothing.

"Viviana." Carmine's voice was warm, easy, tired. "I know you have my brother's phone."

I stayed silent.

"Tomorrow is Sunday. We'll go to Mass at St. Anthony's, the whole family together."

"The parish will see you hand the children over like a good mother."

"No."

"Think about Nonna," he said gently. "She's eighty years old and she lives over a bakery full of flour. It would burn so fast."

The line went dead.

I stood in the small kitchen with the phone shaking in my hand.

Across the room, the children breathed in their sleep.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend