I Brought the Don Back to Burn My Husband novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Five Words at the Gate
Mara catches her husband in bed with his mistress, steals his gun, drives to Brooklyn and offers the dying Don five words; in his study she sees his tea and tells him not to drink it.
The night I found my husband in bed with his mistress, I didn't scream.
I stood in our bedroom doorway until I had seen Lacey Burke laughing in my own silk robe.
Then I took the pistol out of Conway's nightstand and walked out, and neither of them looked up.
I drove across the bridge into Brooklyn with the gun on the passenger seat and the rain coming down hard.
I stopped outside a pair of iron gates at the end of a quiet street.
The Ruggiero compound had no sign, only two cameras and a guard standing in the dark.
Everyone in New York knew whose house it was.
Lucian Ruggiero was thirty-six years old, and the people who feared him called him the Reaper.
Three months ago, his armored car was hit on the Verrazzano Bridge.
He lived, and since then the whole city had whispered the same thing: a failing heart, inoperable, a matter of weeks.
The Commission had called a sit-down in three weeks to name whoever came after him.
His own brother was already measuring the chair.
I stayed in the car and pulled off my wedding ring.
It was a thin gold band Conway had bought on clearance, because marriage was a merger, he said, not a romance.
I rolled down the window and dropped it into the gutter.
The water took it before I heard it land.
My phone buzzed. Conway.
"There you are," he said, warm and easy. "I called the benefit and they said you'd gone. Are you all right?"
"I saw you with Lacey," I said. "In our bed. She had my robe on."
For a moment there was only his breathing.
Then his voice went cold. "You were supposed to be at the clinic benefit until ten."
"I left early."
"Then be reasonable. The prenup is airtight, Mara. You walk away with the clothes you're wearing."
"Then I'll have to find another way."
"Don't do anything stupid."
I hung up and blocked him.
Not a minute later, a text came in from a number I knew by heart.
Six weeks ago, a friend at Mount Sinai had sent me a patient file with the name cut off.
The number was the contact line at the bottom.
I had read the labs at three in the morning and said out loud to my empty kitchen, "That is not a dying heart."
I had never given that number mine.
The message read: "You are parked at my gate with a gun on your seat. You have one minute to tell me why, before my men come out and decide for me."
My hands were steady. Four years of being called useless had not taken that from me.
I typed: "Nine specialists told you your heart is failing. It isn't. You're being poisoned a little at a time, and I can show you tonight."
I added: "In return I need a locked door and a few weeks."
Nothing came back.
Rain ran down the windshield. A car went by and didn't slow.
Then the iron gates groaned open.
A man stepped out of the dark, so broad through the shoulders that he blocked the light behind him.
His jacket hung open over a holster.
He held out his hand for the pistol and I gave it to him.
"The Don will see you, dottoressa," he said.
His eyes were polite and flat.
"One warning. If you lie to him about anything, you don't leave this house."
I had signed the text with nothing, not even my name.
I told myself the file had listed it somewhere, and I walked through.
The compound was all wet stone and lit windows.
Two men fell in behind me without a word.
I caught my reflection in a dark pane as I passed: mascara untouched, back straight.
A woman who had been underestimated for the last time.
The guard took me up a staircase and through a door of dark wood.
The study was warm, with a low fire and the city glittering beyond thick glass.
In a leather chair by the window sat Lucian Ruggiero.
He was thinner than the pictures. Black hair, silver at the temples far too early, a jaw cut hard.
His skin was grey under the lamp.
I watched the pulse in his throat while I crossed the room.
It was slow, then it skipped, then it was slow again.
A woman in an apron over a cashmere sweater stood beside him, setting a cup on the small table at his elbow.
"Your doctor said hot tea is good for your heart," she said warmly.
She gave me a kind nod and went out.
Lucian's eyes had not left me since I came in.
He reached for the cup.
"Don't drink that," I said.
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