Dead to Him novel · Chapter 1 of 16
Chapter 1: Find Out Who She Is
Kasia's body is found in her husband's warehouse and Giovanni doesn't recognize her, and while her blood dries on his floor he texts her to sign the divorce papers.
My body was found in my husband's warehouse.
Someone had left it on the concrete between two stacks of wine crates.
The crates were Barolo. Each one cost more than my father makes in a month.
Giovanni looked down at what was left of my face.
Then he fixed his left cufflink, the gold one that had been his father's.
"Find out who she is," he told his men.
I was standing three feet away from him.
He didn't see me.
He never had, even when I was alive.
The call had come to his phone at two in the morning.
One of his men had found me on a security round of the Varano Imports warehouse on Allens Avenue.
I didn't remember arriving.
One moment there was a boat shed and a gun.
The next there was cold light, the smell of the harbor, and Giovanni walking toward me through the aisle.
I said his name.
He walked right through the place where I stood.
Dr. Luca Bassi knelt beside the body with a surgical mask over his mouth.
He'd driven over from Federal Hill in a coat thrown on over his pajamas.
"Young," he said. "Mid-twenties."
He pulled his gloves tighter.
"Gunshot to the chest, close range. That part was quick."
He looked up at Giovanni.
"Before that, someone kept her for days. Broken fingers. Burns. Rope marks on both wrists."
"And the face?"
"Acid. After she died, I think. Someone didn't want her known."
Giovanni's jaw went tight.
His men went quiet and waited.
"Someone dumped a dead woman on my property," he said. "That's a message. I want to know who sent it."
I looked at the hands on the concrete.
They were mine. I knew the calluses on the fingers from ten years of carving knives.
"Any ID?" Giovanni asked.
"No wallet. No phone. Just this."
Luca held up a clear plastic bag.
Inside was a thin gold chain, stiff with dried blood.
A small wooden rosary hung from it.
Olive wood. Thirty-three beads. A cross no longer than my thumb.
I had made it.
It took me three weeks at the bench in our garage.
I sanded every bead by hand until my thumb couldn't find a single ridge.
My fingertips bled twice.
I gave it to Giovanni on his birthday in November.
He held it in his palm in the kitchen for a long time and didn't say anything.
I thought he liked it.
Then Serafina Rinaldi walked in without knocking, the way she always did.
"What is that?"
She lifted it off his hand with two red nails.
"Gio, please tell me you're not going to wear homemade jewelry. You have a name in this city."
Giovanni took it back from her and dropped it on the counter.
He didn't look at me.
He looked at Serafina.
The next morning I found it in the kitchen trash, under coffee grounds.
I washed it and put it on my own neck.
I wore it every day after that.
Now Giovanni glanced at the bag for one second.
"Bag it separately. Check it for prints."
He didn't know it.
He had held it in his hand, and he didn't know it.
Luca cleared his throat.
"There's one more thing. She was pregnant."
The warehouse went silent.
"How far?"
"About two months."
Giovanni's eyes went dark.
"Someone kills a pregnant woman and leaves her in my building."
He turned to the men.
"Find them. Nobody who touched her walks away."
I stood there and watched him say it.
Two months.
I had told him that exact number five days ago.
It was Thursday night in our kitchen.
I'd made pasta alla norma, his mother's recipe. Agnese had taught it to me from her hospital bed.
The plate sat in front of him, going cold.
He didn't pick up his fork.
"Gio, I'm pregnant," I said. "Two months."
He laughed.
He actually laughed, and wiped his mouth with his napkin, though he hadn't eaten anything.
"We haven't touched each other in months. Whose bastard is it?"
"Yours. The night in January. You came home drunk from Serafina's party."
"Serafina drove me home that night," he said. "She stayed till morning. She said you never came back at all."
That was a lie.
I had been there.
I got him up the stairs with his arm over my shoulders.
I held his head over the toilet when he was sick.
In the dark he reached for me and said my name.
Kasia.
It was the only time in two years he'd said it.
By breakfast Serafina was sitting in my kitchen, telling him the story her way.
"You were a mess," she'd said. "Good thing I stayed. She was out somewhere."
He believed her.
On Thursday he stood up from the table and pushed the plate away.
"If that baby isn't mine, you're dead to me."
The divorce papers came the next morning by courier.
That night, on my way home from the lumber yard, two men pulled me into a van.
Now, in the warehouse, Giovanni took out his phone.
My blood was still drying in the seams of his floor.
He typed with his thumb, fast and bored.
"Sign the divorce papers by tomorrow, Kasia. I'm done waiting."
He hit send.
Somewhere across the city, my phone lit up in a pocket that wasn't mine.
I knew whose.
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