Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: Rox

I turned around in the alley.

Ugo stood by the dumpster with his cigar, smiling under his mustache.

"The last man who wanted me on a table," I said, "is on a bus somewhere with no name and a suitcase. Ask around about how that went for him."

The smile slipped.

Just a little.

Just enough.

Then the side door banged open and Lucio's two men came out into the alley, one on each side of me.

Ugo looked at them.

He dropped his cigar in a puddle and went back inside.

I didn't fly back to the desert that night.

I called Bunny from the back seat of Lucio's car and told her I'd be a week late.

I'd bend the comet's last tail tubes at my father's bench and ship them out in crates.

"Did you say sorry?"

"No."

"Did you break something?"

"His face a little."

"Good girl," Bunny said, and hung up on me.

Leni was asleep on the couch in the front room when we got to the house, with the television on and her clipboard on her chest.

Lucio took the clipboard off her and put a blanket over her.

She didn't wake.

The house was quiet in a way it never had been.

My mother's perfume was gone from the hall.

Her coats were gone from the closet.

The bedroom she'd shared with the old Don stood open and empty at the top of the stairs.

Lucio's room was at the end of the hall.

I'd never been inside it.

In ten years of Sunday dinners I'd never once gone past the bathroom.

It was plain.

A bed, a dresser, a chair, a window open onto the walled garden.

The fig tree moved in the dark below.

He shut the door and leaned back against it.

"You can have the guest room," he said. "I mean it."

"I know you mean it."

I sat down on the edge of his bed in the black dress I'd worn to the table.

I unlaced my work boots and set them side by side on the floor.

"Lucio."

"Mm."

"Ugo said the next table I lie on, I don't get up from."

His face went hard.

"He'll never touch you."

"That's not why I'm telling you."

I looked at my hands.

"I've already lain on one I didn't get up from."

He didn't move from the door.

So I told him.

I said it flat and in order.

Only the last part I couldn't keep flat.

A man saying she's bleeding like I'd spilled something on his floor.

"And then I was in your study with the pen in my hand," I said. "And you said it again. Same words. And I put the pen down."

The room was very quiet.

I waited for him to laugh, or to look at me.

He crossed the room.

He knelt down on the floor in front of me, slowly, with a hand on the mattress for his side.

"You knew about the chart," he said. "On the third night. Before anyone had pulled it."

"Yes."

"I've been asking myself for two months how you knew."

He took both my hands.

His were shaking.

"I believe you," he said.

"Just like that?"

"Rox. You put a pen down on my father's desk and asked me for exactly what you'd need to run. You never asked for a dollar more. You knew the bus. You knew the cold."

He pressed my hands against his mouth.

"Of course I believe you."

"Why do you call me that?" I said. "Rox. Nobody else ever has."

He was quiet for a second.

"The first Sunday your mother brought you to this house, she said Roxie, sit up. Roxie, don't touch that. Roxie, smile."

"She said it like she was calling a dog."

"I wasn't going to say it like that. So I didn't say it at all."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

"Tell me what you would have done," I said. "The first time. If I died on that table."

He didn't answer right away.

"I'd have buried you next to your father," he said. "Then sooner or later I'd have gone looking for the reason you were on that table instead of me."

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