You mafia brats who mistook your mother — kneel before your real mother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Bag

Adriana finds the planted bag and has it swapped; Dario tells her Alfredo's last word was her name.

The duffel bag was in the closet, behind my gray coat, exactly where Dario said it would be.

It was black canvas and heavier than it looked.

I unzipped it and found forty thousand dollars in paper bands, stacked so neatly that someone had enjoyed it.

I sat down on the closet floor and made myself think.

If Cesare's men found it in the morning, I was a thief who had come back to steal the rest.

If I ran, I was the woman who had run twice.

I picked up the room phone and called the number Ruggero's man had left on the desk.

Ruggero was at my door before I had stopped shaking.

He had taken off his tie and his coat, and he looked at the duffel on the bed without saying anything.

His left hand was in his trouser pocket.

"Who put it there?" he said.

"Bianca's driver. Dario saw him."

"Dario called you?"

"He followed your car."

Something moved in Ruggero's face and was gone again.

"The boy's got his father's nerve," he said. "Good. What do you want to do?"

"I want the bag found."

He waited.

"I want it found tonight, in front of everyone," I said. "Just not with the money in it."

I went to my suitcase and pulled out the shoebox I had carried from Lisbon inside a sweater.

It was soft at the corners from twelve years of being carried from one rented room to the next.

I lifted the lid.

Under it were envelopes, one for every birthday I had missed, four stacks of them, each stack tied with a different color of string.

Each one was addressed in my handwriting to a boy who was supposed to hate me.

Ruggero looked at the box and then at me.

"They were never mailed," I said. "I wrote them and kept them. I thought one day I would hand them over myself."

"Adriana."

"Take the money out. Put these in."

He stepped toward the bed and reached for the strap of the duffel at the same moment I did.

His hand closed over mine.

It was a big hand, warm and dry, and it covered all my fingers.

Neither of us let go.

"Your terms," he said, very low. "Nobody's looking."

I was supposed to pull my hand away.

What I did was look at his thumb resting on my knuckles, and think that I had not been touched by anyone for a very long time, and that this was the worst possible man to start with.

"It was the strap," I said. "We both grabbed the strap."

"Yes."

"It was an accident."

"It was," Ruggero said, and took his hand back.

He unloaded the money onto the bed in four stacks.

I packed the envelopes into the bag one tied bundle at a time, the colored strings on top.

Neither of us spoke while we did it.

When he left with the cash in a laundry cart pushed by his man, he stopped at the door and did not turn around.

"For what it's worth," he said, "they're good letters."

"You haven't read them."

"I don't have to."

Then he was gone, and I sat alone on the bed with my palm held open on my knee, looking at nothing.

I did not sleep.

At five in the morning, someone knocked on the door of the suite, three times, very softly.

It was not the knock of a man with a warrant.

I opened it on the chain.

Dario stood in the corridor in a hooded sweatshirt with his hands jammed in the pocket, and for a second all I could see was a seven-year-old standing in the same position at the foot of the stairs, asking where I was going so late.

"Not here," I said, and let him in.

He stayed one step inside the door and would not sit.

"They're coming in an hour," he said. "Cesare told the second son to take the bag and not open it. Bianca wants it opened at dinner, in front of the capos."

"Then they'll open it."

"You're not scared."

"I'm terrified, Dario."

He looked at me then, properly, for the first time.

He had his father's jaw and my mother's eyes, and I had to look away to keep from touching his face.

"She said you'd come back for the crown," he said. "Not for us. She said it for years, every birthday. She said when Dad died you'd come for the money and the crown, and that you'd walk right past us."

"I walked past three hundred people to get to you."

"You walked to the crown."

"The crown was in the way."

He swallowed.

"I don't know why I'm here," he said. "I hate you. I'm supposed to."

"I know."

He pulled the hood back and stared at the carpet.

"My father's last word was your name," he said. "He said it to the ceiling, in the hospital, over and over. Bianca told us it was a curse."

He was gone before I could ask how a man said a curse and meant it.

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