I Locked Two Rival Mob Heirs In, So Neither Lets Me Go novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Ranch Gate

Manny's POV

I left before dawn, and I did not wake her.

She would have come, and she would have been right to, but I needed to do this one thing without her watching.

Dean was asleep on his back with one arm thrown across her ribs and his mouth open.

I had never seen him asleep.

He looked nineteen.

I wrote on the hotel notepad, Gone to do mine, back by eight, and I left it on her pillow under a mint.

Then I drove up the Hamakua coast in the dark with the windows down and my hands shaking on the wheel.

The linguica plant sits on a spur road behind the ranch, a long steel shed with a smokehouse at the back.

The night shift comes off at six.

I stood on a pallet in the loading bay in front of forty people in hairnets, still in yesterday's festa shirt.

I said it fast before I lost my nerve.

The night line had been in my name since my grandmother died, and my father had never once read the paper.

I signed it over to the crew that morning, the wages and the schedule and the right to tell a Rapoza no.

The foreman read it twice and said, "Manny, is this a joke?"

"It's the first one I ever told that wasn't funny," I said.

Then I called the two men who run the back rooms of the game parlors.

By seven the women who deal the cards had two years of held-back wages in an envelope each, out of my own pocket.

Every back door stood open.

My phone rang a dozen times in that hour.

It said Pa every time, and I let every one of them ring out.

I went home to the ranch to wash off the smokehouse, because I could not stand to smell of the family business.

The ranch has a shower behind the barn.

It is a pipe on the wall with a showerhead and a plank floor.

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