The Don Chose His Mistress, So I Chose His Enemy novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fueled Since the Wedding

Declan meets her himself in Boston and sets terms she can leave by; the answer from Chicago is a photograph of her mother's grave with the flowers torn out.

The plane was waiting at the far end of Midway with its stairs down and one light on in the cabin.

I left my car in the garage at St. Anselm's with the keys in the ignition and took a cab.

Nobody had followed me.

That worried me more than if they had.

Declan Harrigan was standing at the top of the stairs in shirtsleeves, with his overcoat over one arm.

He was taller than I remembered from the wedding, and the split through his left eyebrow had not healed any neater.

"Mrs. Falzone," he said.

"Not anymore."

"No," he said. "I heard. Somebody told me an hour ago that the papers were being read at St. Anselm's."

"Somebody told you before I did."

"Somebody always tells me before you're told, Giulia. That's what he was counting on."

He stepped back to let me in.

The cabin was cream leather and smelled of coffee.

There was a blanket folded on my seat and a pair of flat shoes on the floor beside it, my size.

I looked at the shoes.

"Maeve guessed," he said. "She's a nurse. She says nobody leaves a hospital in heels they're glad about."

I sat down and let him see me take my heels off.

We were in the air before either of us spoke again.

"Say what you want," Declan said. He sat across from me with his hands loose between his knees. "Before we land. I don't make offers to a woman who hasn't said her number."

I had practiced it in the car.

"I want my father's crews back. Two hundred men who swore to the Brandolini name and are carrying Renato's instead."

"Go on."

"I want my name back on the warehouse door on Calumet. I want Renato to hear it from his own table that the books are open."

"And Paola?"

"Paola stands in front of everyone she lied to and says it with her own mouth."

He nodded slowly and counted the items off on one hand.

"That's a war," he said.

"It's your war already."

"It is," Declan said. "I want his Calumet dock rights, and the toll he charges every Great Lakes shipper who passes through Chicago. Nine years I've been paying it."

"You'll have them."

"You haven't won them yet."

"Then I'll win them," I said. "You'll need my father's old books for that. I know where Renato keeps the second set."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he held up three fingers.

"Terms," he said. "First, nobody touches you here unless you start it. Not me, not my men, not my sister, who hugs people and will have to be told."

"Fine."

"Second, you don't lie to me about Renato. If you still want him back in a month, you say it to my face."

"I won't want him back."

"Say it in a month. Third, any door in any house of mine is yours. You can walk out any day, and nobody drives you to the airport or asks why."

I had been handed rules before.

Never once had they been rules I could use.

"Why did you give me that card?" I asked. "At my wedding. You weren't even invited."

"I was invited," Declan said. "I came because I wanted to see how he looked at you."

"And?"

"Like a man who'd bought a good horse." He said it plainly, with no heat. "I wrote the number and stood there for an hour deciding whether you'd throw it away."

"I kept it in my mother's rosary case."

"I know," he said. "A man of mine saw you open it once, at the airport, years ago. I should have thanked him."

I did not know what to do with that, so I pulled the blanket over my knees and watched Lake Michigan go out of sight under the wing.

We landed at Hanscom a little after two in the morning.

The house was a narrow brick one in South Boston, with a green door and a light in every window.

A woman in scrubs and a grey cardigan was holding it open before the car stopped.

She had red hair twisted into a knot and a pencil stuck through it.

"You're her," she said. "I'm Maeve. He's never brought a woman home, so I bought you the good toothbrush and a pair of socks that don't itch."

"That's very kind."

"It's not kind, it's nursing." She took my coat off my shoulders. "Declan, put the kettle on. Don't stand there looking like a bouncer."

There was a plate of soda bread waiting in the kitchen and a pot of tea gone dark.

I ate two slices standing up.

Nobody asked me one question about the hospital, and that was the first time all night I felt my hands stop shaking.

Then Declan's phone lit on the counter.

He read it, and his face changed in a way I had not seen yet.

"Tell me," I said.

"It came from Renato's own number."

"Show me."

He held it out.

It was a photograph of my mother's grave at Queen of Heaven, taken at night with a flash.

Every white rose I had planted there in the spring had been pulled out and laid on the grass.

Under it Renato had typed: Tell her the plot beside it is already paid for.

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