I Was the Mafia's Maid, Now I'm Their Regret novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Not in the Book
At the Family dinner Livia asks for her year to be entered, is refused, and walks out in front of her father; the consigliere says her page is empty.
At my own birthday dinner nobody said a word about it, so I posted a year of my work in the family chat.
Photos, dates, supply counts, every guard's shift written out in my handwriting.
Nobody opened it.
The word Delivered sat under my message while the long table filled up around me.
My hands still smelled of the bleach I had used on the kitchen floor at five that morning.
In the Gallardi Family there is one rule everybody learns before they can read.
When you do something for the Family, the consigliere writes your name in the black ledger, my father signs it, and you collect a reward.
My older sister, who is twenty-five, had been written in that week for confirming a guest list.
My little brother, who is seventeen, had been written in for carrying lunch to the accounting office.
For a year I had counted the safe house stores, burned the used cipher sheets and cooked three meals a day for the whole estate.
The consigliere called it housework, so my page was blank.
My sister slid her dinner plate across the table to me without looking up.
"Take that, Liv. And quit posting your lists in the chat, it's annoying."
"I wanted someone to look at them," I said.
"Nobody gave you those jobs." She went back to her phone. "If the consigliere didn't write it down, what are you even counting?"
At the far end the consigliere sat with the ledger open beside his wine glass.
Two capos were giving him their reports.
One was Valerio Carraro, the only capo who ever carried his own plate to the sink.
Then the front doors opened and everybody stood, even the capos.
My father came in with a shopping bag in each hand, and my sister Bianca ran to him like she was nine.
"Did you get it, Dad?"
"Would I forget?" He kissed her hair and handed her a velvet box. "Your diamond studs."
The other bag went to my brother Elio, who tore into a gaming laptop and whooped.
I had asked my father for one thing, a small silver watch, and I had been asking for a month.
I waited until both bags were empty.
"Dad."
"Later, Livia," he said, already following Bianca upstairs to the dance studio that used to be my bedroom.
That morning I had asked my mother for my baby pictures.
"When I have time," she had said, and turned a page of Bianca's album.
Now I looked at her across the table.
She was folding her napkin and did not look up.
So I stood.
"I'd like my year entered," I said, loud enough for the capos to hear.
My father stopped on the stairs. "Not at the table, Livia."
"It's my birthday, Dad. I'm twenty-two today."
"Is it?" He glanced at my mother.
"We'll do something tomorrow," she said to her napkin.
The consigliere didn't raise his eyes. "Housework isn't service. We've been over this."
I unhooked the ring from my belt, the house keys, the gate fob, the safe house keys, and set it down on top of the open ledger.
"Then I'm done. I'm leaving tonight."
My father laughed. "Where would you go?"
"Somewhere nobody needs a book to say what I did."
"Who's going to clean my room?" Elio asked, with his mouth full.
Bianca laughed into her wine.
I looked down the table at Valerio Carraro, who had eaten my cooking every Thursday for a year.
He looked at his plate and said nothing.
So I walked out.
I did not run.
The guard at the dining room door, whose shifts I had written out for a year, looked at the floor.
Behind me I heard the consigliere shut the ledger and say, very quietly, "Let her go, Aurelio. Her page is empty. She owes this Family nothing."
I stopped in the hall with my hand on the door.
My father's chair scraped back.
"Renata," he said. "Did you know about that?"
My mother did not answer.
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