Kneel, Mafia Boss, Your Wife Is Gone novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Your Wife Is Gone
Ilaria buries her parents in Naples while her husband sits with his assassin, and when he calls her a scene-maker she signs her real name in the book of the house and texts him four words.
They lowered my father's coffin into the ground in Naples, and my husband was not there to see it.
Two hundred men in black stood on the cemetery hill above the bay.
They had come from Salerno and Caserta and Rome to see who the Sorrentino house would choose now that its Don was dead.
The daughter was a rumor to them, hidden abroad for five years, and not one of them knew her face.
For five years I had lived in Philadelphia as Ilaria Conte, a baker's girl with dead parents and no family.
My husband had never once asked me to prove it.
I stood at the edge of the grave with my mother's pearls at my throat and a black veil I had borrowed from my cousin's wife.
The wreath on the coffin was white roses.
A gold seahorse was pinned to its ribbon.
I had seen that little pin before, on the lapel of every man who stood beside my husband at our wedding.
I decided it was a Neapolitan thing and stopped looking at it.
My cousin Nico stood on my right with his jaw clenched.
He was the only person in that crowd who knew who I was, besides the old man on my left, leaning on a cane he never actually used.
Aurelio Basile had been my father's right hand for thirty years.
"Donna," he said quietly. "The men are waiting."
"One more minute."
I checked my phone again.
Nine days ago a car had gone off the coast road above Amalfi with my parents inside it.
Nine days I had called my husband.
He had answered twice.
The first time he said he was sorry for my loss and that the Calabrese meeting couldn't move.
The second time he said, "Ila, I'll try."
This morning at the airport in Philadelphia, Gemma Landi had hugged me hard at the departure gate.
She was Dominic's right hand, the best shot in his crew, and the closest thing I had to a friend in his world.
She had driven me there herself with his suit jacket still folded on the back seat.
"Go," she said. "I'll make sure he calls you. I'll drag him to the phone if I have to."
At midnight Naples time she texted me again.
He's stuck in a dinner for his family's anniversary. He'll come after. Take care of yourself.
That was ten hours ago.
The priest finished.
The first shovel of earth hit my father's coffin, and I couldn't breathe.
I walked to the top of the cemetery steps, away from the crowd, and I called my husband.
He picked up on the fourth ring.
Behind him I could hear glasses and a woman laughing.
"Ila." His voice was low and impatient. "I told you I'd call when I could."
"They're burying my father."
"I know."
"Where are you, Dominic?"
"At the club. It's the anniversary dinner, and the families are here. I can't walk out of it for a funeral you could have told me about earlier."
"I told you nine days ago."
"You told me they died. You didn't say I had to be there."
The woman laughed again, and this time she said something close to the phone.
I knew that voice.
I had heard it say good morning in my own kitchen.
"Is that Gemma?"
"She's sitting next to me. She's been up for two days handling the Calabrese mess, Ila. Somebody has to hold this family together."
"My mother is in the ground."
"You haven't spoken to them in five years. Your real family is here."
I said nothing.
I had told him my parents cut me off when I left Naples, and he had never wanted to hear more.
"Listen to me," he said. His tone changed, the way it did when he spoke to his men. "Gemma is my comrade. She has stood next to me for ten years. I won't have you making this about her."
"I didn't say her name."
"You were about to. Stop acting like a child and come home when you're done. We'll talk."
Gemma said something in the background, and he laughed.
He laughed.
I looked down the hill at my father's grave and the two hundred men waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
Five years ago my father had given me one condition, and I had kissed his cheek and promised.
Five years, and then I come home.
I had spent every day of it trying to be small enough for the man who just hung up on me.
My thumb found my wedding ring.
It was a plain gold band, and it came off with no fight at all.
I walked back to the grave.
The men parted for me without knowing why.
I held the ring over the open earth, and I let it fall onto my father's coffin.
It rang once against the lid.
"Donna Ilaria," Aurelio said. He had never used my real name in public before. "The book of the house is in the car."
"Bring it."
He signaled to Nico, and Nico ran.
On the hood of the black car, with two hundred men watching in the wind, Aurelio opened a leather book older than my grandfather.
He handed me a pen.
I wrote my name under my father's.
Ilaria Sorrentino.
Nobody spoke.
Then the oldest man in the crowd took off his hat, and the man beside him did the same, and I watched two hundred heads go down in front of me.
Nico was grinning through tears.
"Say it, Donna," he whispered.
I took out my phone and typed to my husband with a hand that did not shake.
Your wife is gone.
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