My Mafia Fiancé Thought I'd Always Let Him Get Away With Anything novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Spare Room

Cesare takes her above his restaurant while the clip spreads through the family. At two in the morning her father's old adviser arrives with a sealed letter that can only be opened at the Table.

Cesare drove to Taylor Street without saying anything.

I held his coat shut at my throat and watched Chicago go by, wet and orange under the streetlights.

My phone buzzed in my lap.

Then again.

Then it would not stop.

The video was already out.

One of Nico's cousins had put it in the family group chat before I reached the end of the block.

It showed me on the step in my sequins with the cake at my feet, and Nico's hand holding the door.

It had four hundred views, and the number kept climbing.

Under it somebody had written: Orsini princess begs for her key.

I had not begged.

I scrolled to the end to be sure.

I had not said please once.

It did not matter.

Cut a certain way, a woman standing outside a door looks like a woman asking to be let in.

"Turn it off," Cesare said.

"I'm checking something."

"You're hurting yourself."

I put the phone face down on my knee.

It buzzed against my leg anyway.

The restaurant on Taylor Street was dark when we got there, with the chairs stacked on the tables.

SABATINI'S was painted in gold on the window.

I had eaten here with my father on Sundays when I was little, back when it belonged to someone else.

Cesare unlocked a narrow door beside the main one and led me up a stairwell that smelled of garlic and old wood.

His flat had a kitchen, a couch, a window over the street and one closed door at the end.

"The spare room is yours," he said. "Clean sheets. I changed them in March, so don't look too hard."

"Why would you change them in March?"

"My sister was supposed to visit."

He took a glass from a shelf and filled it at the tap and handed it to me.

I was shaking, and I had not noticed until the water slopped over the rim.

He took the glass back, set it on the counter, and kept his hands to himself.

"Here's how it works," he said. "You sleep in there. I sleep on the office sofa downstairs. Nothing happens in this flat except sleep and coffee."

"That's a rule?"

"It's a rule."

"Why?"

"Because you came out of a door tonight with nothing on you but a dress. I won't be one more man who took something from you."

He said it flat, to the counter.

I looked at his hands, at the white scars on the knuckles of the left one.

My phone buzzed again.

This time it was a text.

Nico: Come home when you're done sulking. Fi will leave the light on for you.

I read it twice.

Then I held the phone out to Cesare, because I did not trust myself to answer.

He read it and gave it back without a word.

"He thinks I'll go," I said.

"Will you?"

"No."

"You said that easily."

"It was easy."

He studied me for a long moment with his jaw set.

"Renata. Do you love him?"

"No."

"You were going to marry him in three weeks."

"I promised my father I would. He was dying, and he asked, and Nico was standing right there holding his other hand."

I sat down on the arm of the couch.

"I told myself that the loving would come. I think I stopped waiting for it a long time ago and never looked."

Cesare said nothing.

His shoulders came down an inch.

I hadn't known he had been holding them up.

"Why were you outside the house tonight?" I asked. "Nico said you quit."

"I never quit. He moved me to the docks the day after the funeral, so I couldn't be at the house."

"I was never told that."

"No." His mouth went thin. "I figured."

"Then why did you come?"

"I didn't get an invitation to the party." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I parked across the street anyway. I told myself I'd just look at the lights. Then I saw the door."

I went to the spare room and lay on top of the covers with his coat over me.

I did not sleep.

At two in the morning, someone knocked on the street door downstairs.

Three slow knocks, and one more.

I heard Cesare's feet cross the office, and then the bolt.

When I came to the top of the stairs, he was bringing up an old man in a gray overcoat with an envelope in his hand.

I knew him at once.

He had been my father's adviser for thirty years, and he had stood behind my father's chair at every Table I was never allowed to attend.

"Renata," he said. His voice was rough with sleep or grief. "I'm sorry it's so late."

"What is that?"

He held it out.

It was thick cream paper, sealed with a blob of red wax pressed with a ring.

My father's ring.

I put my hand on my chest where it hung against my skin.

"He gave me this a week before he died," the old man said. "He said, 'Keep it until Nico shames her in front of the men. Then take it to the Table, and not before.'"

"Shames me how?"

"He would not say. He said I would know." He looked at me, and his eyes were wet. "Tonight I heard what happened. I knew."

I reached for the seal.

His hand closed over mine, gently.

"Not here. It can only be opened in front of the Table."

"Then let's go to the Table."

"Nico has already called it." He let go. "For Sunday morning. He will announce the wedding date and he wants you at his side."

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