I Left My Husband Bleeding, and the Mob Boss Said Good novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: His Father's Couch
The cold outside the kitchen doors smelled of fryer oil and snow.
Marwan put me into the Range Rover himself and shut the door on the hem of my dress.
His driver pulled out before I had found the seat belt.
Nobody spoke on the freeway.
I watched the dark go by and counted backward.
On Wednesday I had burned my thumb on a tray of date pastries and sworn at the oven in two languages.
On Wednesday Fadi had already been dead, or was dying while I swore.
I looked at my thumb.
The blister had healed to a pink shine.
Marwan took my hand and laid it on the seat between us, and he held it there until the gate had closed behind us.
The house was dark except for the hall light.
The housekeeper had taken Yara up to sleep in her own bed, and a strip of lamplight showed under her door.
Marwan did not take me to the stairs.
He took me down the ground-floor hall to a door I had passed for two months and never seen open.
"My father's," he said.
He opened it and did not turn on the light.
The study smelled of leather and old tobacco.
Streetlight came through the slats of the blinds and lay in bars across a desk, a wall of ledgers and a long brown couch.
Over the couch hung a photograph of a thin man in a tie at the head of a wedding table, laughing with his mouth open.
"He had the stroke at a table like that one," Marwan said.
"Why are we in here?"
"It's the one room in this house where nobody was ever hurt."
I looked at the photograph.
"I'm glad he's dead," I said.
It came out in Chaldean, in my mother's voice, and I put my hand over my mouth.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Left My Husband Bleeding, and the Mob Boss Said Good are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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