I Got Pregnant by My Boss, the Mob Heir, So He Put a Ring on It novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dock Call
Raisa winches a wrecked car out of the harbor and finds her boss's wounded cousin zipped in the trunk; Gio walks onto the dock, learns she is pregnant in front of his men, and she quits just before he puts his grandmother's ring in her palm.
The car came up out of the harbor slush with a man zipped in its trunk, and he was still alive.
I heard him before I saw him.
A fist was banging on sheet metal from the inside, slow and weak, under the grind of my winch.
It was past two in the morning at the yard ramp, and the lake was making ice around the pilings.
I killed the winch and climbed down off truck 6 with my flashlight in my teeth.
The wrecked sedan hung from the hook with water streaming out of its doors.
I put my boot against the bumper and pulled the trunk release.
The lid sprang up.
A man lay folded inside in a black wool coat gone dark with blood at the left shoulder.
He was my boss's cousin Lorenzo, and he was smiling at me.
"Evening, tow girl," he said through chattering teeth.
"You're early."
"Don't move," I said.
"I won't."
His eyes went past me to the dark behind the floodlights, and the smile went out.
I turned around.
Four of the yard's men stood in a half circle by the shed, big and silent in their coats.
A black Charger had rolled onto the dock behind them with its lights off.
My boss got out of it.
He wore a dark overcoat and a black watch cap, and he walked toward the car without hurrying.
He was thirty-four and he ran the Brandisi yard, and in three years he had never said forty words to me in a row.
Six weeks ago he had said a great many more, in the dark on the shop floor after the party.
Neither of us had said anything about it since.
His eyes passed over his cousin in the trunk and came to me.
They went to my right hand.
I had held it in my coat pocket since four that afternoon, around a plastic stick with two pink lines on it.
I had pulled it out when I climbed down without thinking.
It was still in my fist, with the little window showing.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Nobody on that dock made a sound.
"Tell them," Gio said.
His voice was quiet, and it carried to every man there.
"Tell them whose baby it is."
I had practiced telling him for two weeks.
I had sat in my truck outside the yard gate every night after my shift and said it to the windshield, and never once got to the end.
Now four of his men were watching me, and his cousin was bleeding in a car I had hauled up with my own winch.
I understood what I had just seen.
People who see that sort of thing in this town do not get to go home and think about it.
"It's yours," I said.
His face did not move.
"It's yours," I said again, louder.
"I'm not asking you for anything."
"Raisa," Gio said.
"I'm not asking any of you for anything," I told the dock.
I looked at each of the four men in turn, so they would know I wasn't afraid.
My knees were shaking inside my coveralls.
I unclipped the yard's key ring from my belt, with the key to truck 6, the gate fob and the little brass one for the lockbox.
I held it up in the floodlight.
"I quit," I said.
"Effective now."
"You don't quit," Gio said.
"I'm quitting."
I stepped up close enough to smell the cold on his coat and the faint smoke under it.
He was a head taller than me even though I was five-eight, and I did not look down.
I put the keys against his chest and let go.
They hit the dock boards with a clank.
"Good night, Mr. Brandisi," I said.
I turned my back on him and on his men and started up the ramp toward the road.
I did not run.
I walked past truck 6 and past the gate, and had barely stepped out of the light when his hand closed on my wrist.
It was warm and it was not rough.
It stopped me the way a railing does.
"Come back here," he said, low.
"Let go of me."
"No."
He turned me around to face the dock.
The four men had not moved.
His cousin had pulled himself upright in the trunk with a hand on the rear fender, watching us with bright wet eyes.
Gio held my wrist up between us.
With his other hand he reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat.
What he took out was small and old.
It was a narrow gold band worn thin on one side, with a tiny diamond set low in plain claws.
He pressed it into my palm and folded my fingers over it with his.
"This was my grandmother's," he said.
"Her name was Concetta."
"I don't want it," I said.
"I know," he said.
He lifted his head and spoke past me to the dock.
"Everybody listen.
"This is Raisa Kaarlela.
"She's my fiancée, she's carrying my child, and anyone who puts a hand on her answers to me."
I stood there with the ring cold in my fist and every eye on the yard fixed on my face.
I thought about the keys on the boards, and the truck idling by the ramp, and my own two feet that wanted to keep walking.
I thought about the baby.
I closed my hand around the ring.
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