The Cyber Twins novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Verdict
Ottavio sat down.
He did it slowly, and forty people watched the don lower himself into his own chair.
He laid both hands on the cloth.
"Jillian told me the spring fix was hers," he said.
"I know," I said. "It was mine."
He turned his heavy eyes to Jillian, and I watched her understand that the silence had been the verdict.
"Cara," he said. "Stand up."
She stood.
She was trembling, and her emerald silk shook around her knees.
"Ottavio, I'm family."
"You were."
"I carried your wife's coffin."
"You carried my wife's coffin and took Desmond Crowe's money the same year," Ottavio said. "I have read your nine rows. I matched the dates against the funeral."
Her face went slack.
"Your accounts are the family's from this minute," he said. "Your apartment. The second one, too. The car."
"You can't."
"Your name comes off every door on the water. Your seat at my table is empty. You are the Key no longer."
"Papà," Nico said quietly, "she knows our whole Wall."
"That is why she will walk out of here with nothing, and a man at each shoulder, and why no house on the docks will give her a desk. I have already made the calls."
He had.
Down the table, a captain I had sat beside for a year folded his napkin and pushed his chair back from Jillian.
Another did the same.
Then all of them.
She turned in a circle, looking for one face that would meet hers.
Then she looked at me.
"You," she hissed. "You sat there for eight years, and I made you somebody. You'd still be binding books in a basement if it weren't for me."
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