I Was the Mafia's Maid, Now I'm Their Regret novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Three Days

Valerio gives her three days, Livia sets her terms and says the thing she has held against him, and he tells her about the engagement dinner she's ordered to serve.

I went down in my coat and my socks and got into the passenger seat so my study partner wouldn't hear.

The heater was already running.

Valerio Carraro sat with both hands on the wheel and did not look at me right away.

He had a scar through his left eyebrow that I had seen every Thursday for a year, usually over a plate of my ziti.

"How did you find me?" I asked.

"The gate camera logged which bus you took. The bus line has one stop near this campus."

"Who set up the log?"

"You did."

I had typed the gate log myself, every night, for twelve months.

I almost laughed.

"Your father told me to bring you home by Sunday dinner," he said. "I'm not going to do that tonight."

"Why not?"

"Because you'd have to be dragged, and I don't drag people."

I held my hands in my lap.

They were cold, and I had not noticed until he reached over without a word and turned the heater vent toward my side.

It was his car, I told myself.

Probably the vent was just broken.

"I'm giving you three days," he said. "I'll tell him I haven't found you until Wednesday. After that I run out of lies."

"I didn't ask you for three days."

"I know you didn't."

"My bank card is dead," I said. "The account's closed."

"That's the oldest move in the book." He said it flatly. "Cut the money and let her get hungry. Then she comes home on her own and thanks him for dinner."

"I'm not going home."

"I figured."

I looked out at the empty street.

Then I said the thing I had been holding since the dinner table.

"I have terms."

He turned his head.

"Nothing from you goes in any book. And nothing I take from you is a favor. No rides, no cash, no coffee that I owe you for."

"That's a lot of nothing."

"It's what I have."

He studied me for a second.

"Fine," he said. "Those are your terms."

I should have stopped there.

I did not.

"You ate at that table every Thursday for a year," I said. "I cooked what you ate. I wiped your place after you left."

"I know."

"And you never once said my name. Not to the consigliere, not to my father, not to anyone. You sat there with your plate and let him call it housework."

Valerio was quiet for a long moment.

"No," he said. "I didn't."

I waited for the excuse.

"I carried my plate to the sink so you wouldn't have to," he said. "I told myself that counted for something. It didn't."

His voice was even, but his jaw had gone tight.

"If I'd said your name at that table, Aurelio would have looked at you. I didn't know what he'd do once he did."

"He never looked at me anyway."

"Right," Valerio said. "I see that now."

We sat there in the glow of the dashboard, and I discovered that I was not as angry as I had been a minute earlier.

That annoyed me too.

"What else did he say?" I asked. "My father."

"That your tuition is frozen. The foundation that pays it answers to him."

I closed my eyes.

I had one semester left.

"And he wants you at the house Saturday night," Valerio said. "Bianca's engagement dinner."

My eyes opened. "Her what?"

"She's marrying the heir of the family across the river. Your father announces it at the table, in front of every capo and every wife."

"She never said a word."

"She found out Monday."

I thought of Bianca, sliding her plate to me, glowing over her phone.

She had known for days.

"He wants you there in an apron, serving," Valerio said. "If you pour the wine, he'll put the tuition back."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you stay out. And he finds another way to get you inside."

I shook my head.

"I'm not wearing an apron in that house again."

"I didn't think you would."

He reached for the key, then took his hand back.

"One more thing, and it's not an order."

"What?"

"When I left, your father didn't ask whether you were safe, or warm, or where you'd sleep."

Valerio looked at me for the first time since I got in the car.

"He asked what you'd taken with you. Then he asked what you remember."

I stared at him.

Every guard's shift.

Every safe house.

Every code I had burned page by page, after reading it first.

I remembered all of it.

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