Chapter 15: The Deed

Domenico's POV

I did not sleep after she left, and at dawn I stopped pretending to.

My shoulder had stiffened overnight, so I dressed one-handed.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed where she had slept.

She had said she would be back when she was not angry at me.

She was right to be angry, and I had no way to make that smaller.

I could only make something bigger on the other side of it.

By eight I was in the office above Pier Four, with my father's lawyer standing in front of my desk.

He was an old man with a cane who had written my father's will.

He did not like what I had asked him to write.

"Both piers," he said. "The whole Santangelo waterfront. In a Greco woman's name."

"Cara Lombardi Greco, in her own name, under no one's control."

I pushed the pen across the blotter.

"The deed says it's settlement of a debt."

"What debt?"

"One that I owe her."

He looked at me for a long moment over his glasses.

"If this is for a woman, Domenico, there are cheaper ways."

"It isn't a gift and it isn't a bribe," I said.

"If it were, she'd have to thank me. She never has to thank me. It's hers. She can burn it."

"And what does she owe you for it?"

"Nothing."

"That's not a deal."

"That's why it's a deed."

He sighed, and he made the changes, and I signed all four copies with my left hand, badly.

The ink was still wet when I took the rubber band stack out of my breast pocket.

Twenty slips in her block letters, all copies of the Warehouse Nine page.

I had read them so often the folds had gone soft.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Replaced His Wife and Lost His Mafia Empire from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.