The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Forty-Eight Hours

Ruggero Cassio tells her to leave Chicago or end like her parents, so Dalia signs herself out and drives the twins to her grandmother's gates, where the fake heiress opens the door.

I had never once heard a stranger say my mother's face out loud.

"I don't know you," I said.

"No," Ruggero agreed. "But I knew her."

He held out the white roses.

I didn't take them.

"Your room is 412, I believe. Shall we sit? You look like you might fall."

"Say it here."

"Here is a nursery," he said gently. "Let's not frighten the children."

The nurse came down the hall and saw an old man in cashmere holding flowers beside a new mother.

She smiled at him.

She thought he was my grandfather.

He followed me back to my room and closed the door with two fingers.

Then he sat in the visitor's chair, crossed his legs, and took off his glasses to polish them.

"Donna Ludovica's telephone rings at one in the morning," he said, "and I hear about it before she's hung up. You understand that's my job. Everything that comes into that house comes through me."

"She hung up on me."

"She did. She's eighty-two, and her heart is very tired, and she has a granddaughter now. A lovely girl. Married last night. You saw."

"I saw my mother's locket on her neck."

"A lot of lockets look alike."

"Not that one."

He put the glasses back on.

When he looked at me again, his voice didn't change at all.

It stayed soft and kind, and that was the worst part.

"You're going to take your babies and leave Chicago," he said. "You have forty-eight hours. I'll buy the bakery for whatever you think it's worth, and you'll sign whatever my lawyer brings. Arizona is nice. So is Florida."

"And if I don't?"

He smoothed his coat over his knee.

"Taylor Street can be a rough block after dark. People get robbed. Bakeries keep cash." He tipped his head toward the hall, where the nursery was. "It would be a terrible thing, a robbery like your parents'. Twice, in one family."

The room went very quiet.

I was fifteen again, folded up on a milk crate in the walk-in cooler, with my hand over my own mouth.

I heard the first shot again.

I heard my mother say "Please," the way she said it to customers.

I heard the second shot.

Then nobody said anything for a long time, until a man's hands lifted me out into the light.

Thirteen years I'd told myself it was two junkies and a cash register.

Three hundred dollars.

Ruggero Cassio watched my face while I put it together.

"There," he said softly. "Now we understand each other."

He stood, buttoned his coat, and laid the roses on my tray table.

"For the babies. Congratulations, Dalia."

I sat there until the shaking stopped.

Then I dropped the roses in the medical waste bin, stems first, and called Benedetta.

She was there in forty minutes, still in last night's green dress, mascara under both eyes, a Dunkin' bag in each hand.

"Was it Teo? I'll kill him."

"Close the door, Benny."

She closed it.

I told her.

I told her about my mother, the Morras, the number, the locket and the man in the cashmere coat.

When I finished, she wiped her nose with a Dunkin' napkin.

"You're Ludovica Morra's granddaughter," she said.

"Yes."

"And my brother married a fake one. In front of the whole Table. On the night you had his kids."

"Yes."

"Oh, he's going to die."

"You can't tell him."

"Dalia."

"Swear to me. I don't know who he belongs to anymore, Benny. He married her in that woman's house. Ruggero walks those halls. If Teo opens his mouth to the wrong man, my babies are the robbery."

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she held up her pinky.

I hooked it.

"Okay," she said. "So we pack you up and get you out of town?"

"No."

"No?"

"He said leave Chicago. He didn't say don't go see my grandmother."

Benedetta's mouth fell open.

The pediatrician didn't like it.

The twins were small, five pounds and four pounds eleven.

They were breathing and feeding and holding their sugar, but he'd have liked one more day.

I signed the form that said I was leaving against medical advice, and the second form, and the third.

Benedetta brought her brother's car seat bases up from the garage, two of them, still in the boxes.

He'd bought them a month ago.

I didn't say anything about that.

By three in the afternoon we were on the Eisenhower heading west, the babies asleep in the back.

I wore a borrowed sweatshirt and a hospital pad the size of a loaf of bread.

River Forest was big lawns and old trees and houses set way back from the road.

The Morra house was the biggest.

It had stone walls and iron gates.

A crown was worked into the iron at the top, the same crown as the one on my mother's locket.

The gates stood open for last night's caterers, and Benedetta drove straight through.

I got out with my son on my chest in a sling and my daughter in her car seat over my arm.

I walked up eleven stone steps and rang the bell.

The door opened.

It wasn't a housekeeper.

It was the bride.

Carlotta, in an ivory silk robe with lace at the cuffs, her black hair loose down her back, last night's lipstick still on.

My mother's locket hung at her throat.

She looked at the babies.

She looked at the hospital bracelet still on my wrist.

She laughed.

"My grandmother doesn't take walk-ins."

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