The Mafia Lost His Queen novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: My Own Funeral

Gianna watches her own funeral from the choir loft as Armando weeps over an empty casket and fires Rory on the steps, and then Serena looks up and sees her.

Rory didn't move.

He knelt on the ramp with the barrel against his forehead and the rain running into his eyes.

I was already standing.

I had one foot out from under the bridge.

If I walked into those headlights, Armando would lower the gun.

Then he'd take me home, and in a week I'd be pouring Serena's wine again.

Rory turned his head a quarter inch.

He found me in the dark under the bridge.

He shook his head, once.

I stepped back into the mud.

Armando's consigliere came down the ramp with his phone to his ear.

"Sirens, Armando. Two minutes out. Put it away."

For a long second nothing happened.

Then Armando lowered the gun and hit Rory across the face with it instead.

Rory went down sideways on the concrete.

Armando walked to the edge of the water.

He stood there in his good coat with the river pulling at his shoes.

"Gianna!"

He shouted it at the water.

He shouted it again, and his voice broke in the middle.

I put both hands over my mouth and didn't make a sound.

The police came. Then the divers.

They pulled my car out at dawn with a tow truck. The driver's window was down.

They found my wedding ring in the cupholder.

They didn't find me.

A week later I watched my own funeral from the choir loft at Our Lady of Sorrows.

It was the church where I got married.

Rory had let me in through the bell tower door at six that morning, with a coffee and two glazed doughnuts.

Then he'd gone to stand outside with the other mourners.

His left eye was still purple and swollen shut.

I sat on the floor behind the organ in a black dress and a black scarf and looked down through the carved rail.

The church was full.

All the families had come. The Abates sat in the third row.

My cousin sat in the fourth with her husband, crying into a tissue.

At the front was a closed white casket.

It was empty.

Armando had wanted it closed so nobody would ask why.

Serena sat in the front pew in black lace, one hand on her stomach.

Armando got up to speak.

He put both hands on the pulpit and didn't say anything for a while.

"My wife baked," he said finally. "Every Sunday. Her father's sfogliatelle. The whole house smelled like orange and butter."

People nodded in the pews.

"She left me a gift on our anniversary," he said. "A little silver box on my desk."

My fingers went tight on the rail.

"And I never opened it." He looked down. "I never opened it, and now I'll never know what she wanted to tell me."

Somebody in the back sobbed.

I sat behind the organ and felt nothing at all.

He had held out his hand to her at the top of the cellar stairs.

That was what I wanted to tell him.

When he came back to the front pew, Serena reached up and put her hand on his arm.

Armando looked down at her hand.

Then he took it by the wrist and moved it off him.

Serena's face went white.

She folded her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead for the rest of the mass.

They carried the empty casket out to the cars.

I moved to the little round window over the doors and watched the steps.

Rory stood at the bottom with his hands clasped in front of him, like he had stood behind me for five years.

Armando came down the steps and stopped in front of him.

Everybody on the steps went quiet to listen.

"You were supposed to keep her safe," Armando said.

"Yes, sir."

"You had one job."

"Yes, sir."

"Go home to London, Barrow." Armando straightened Rory's tie for him, slowly. "If I ever see you again, I'll bury you next to her."

He slapped Rory's cheek twice, lightly, like a father.

Rory didn't flinch.

"Yes, sir," he said, and walked away down the sidewalk without looking back.

He didn't look up at the window.

Good man.

The cars started to pull away from the curb.

Serena was the last on the steps. She was waiting for her father's driver, one hand pressed into the small of her back.

She tipped her head back to look at the bell tower.

Then her eyes came down to the little round window.

To me.

I didn't move.

I couldn't.

She looked at me through the glass for three long seconds.

Then Serena Abate smiled.

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