I Saved the Man He Shot, So the Mob Boss Kept Me novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Key

Nikos's POV

It snowed on the second Saturday in January, and I carried her key up to the roof.

I had been thinking about it for two weeks.

She had asked me for something at Christmas that I did not know how to give.

She had said stop being careful, all the way, once.

I had lain awake beside her after the words and counted every way I could hurt her.

I am a man of two hundred and forty pounds.

She is a woman of five foot two who lifts a patient with a bedsheet and a nurse on the other side.

I knew she was strong.

I also knew what my hands could do.

So I did the one thing I could do.

I took the ring of keys off the hook by the kitchen door.

It held the front and the back, the cellar and the roof, and the taverna's wine room.

It held the little brass one for the office on Boston Street.

I put them in my coat pocket.

In the other pocket was my grandmother's ring.

Yiayia had pressed it into my hand in October, without a word, and I had carried it ever since.

I climbed to the roof first and brushed the snow off the bench by the chimney with my sleeve.

The Domino sign was lit red behind the falling flakes.

The harbor was black below it.

She came out the roof door in her heavy coat and her gray wool hat.

Her cheeks were pink, and her gloved hands held two paper cups.

"Hot chocolate," she said. "It's gross. The machine at work makes it. I've been saving these."

I took one.

It was gross.

I drank it anyway.

"I have something to give you," I said.

"If it's a hat, I have a hat."

"It isn't a hat."

I took the keys out and held them in my open left hand.

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