Chapter 8: The Alley

I didn't delete the text.

I walked back down the hall and held the phone up in front of Damiano's face.

He read it once.

A muscle moved in his jaw.

"He wants you scared," he said.

"It's working."

"Is it?"

"No," I said. "It's making me angry."

"I want to know why a man I met on Saturday keeps my photo on his desk and gets shot at for marrying me."

"I'll be in the kitchen," she said. "Pretending I can't hear."

She didn't move.

Damiano looked at me for a long time.

Then he took his car keys off the hall table, the spare set, for the gray car in the garage.

"Get dressed," he said. "I'll show you."

He drove himself.

Two of his men followed in another car.

He parked on Huron Street in River North.

I knew the block before he turned the engine off.

The brick building on the corner had a yoga studio on the ground floor now, with a sign about hot vinyasa.

Four years ago it had been my gallery.

My name had been on the window in gold leaf.

"Come on," he said.

He took me around the side of the building, into the alley behind it.

It still smelled like the dumpster from the Thai place next door.

The steel back door to my old storeroom was painted green now instead of black.

Damiano stopped in front of it.

"Late October," he said. "Four years ago. About midnight. You were locking this door."

I went cold all over.

"There was a man sitting against that wall," he said, nodding at the dumpster.

"He'd been shot across the ribs. He had a beard. He told you to walk away."

"I didn't," I whispered.

"No. You looked at him for about three seconds, and then you unlocked the door again."

Keep reading free with an account. Start This Time I Choose Mr. Mafia from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.