Mafia Princess Returns novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Before Dawn

Enrico tests what she knows, and two men sent to bring her home and kill him break into Nonna's bakery before sunrise.

Enrico took the chain off the door.

He did it fast.

The apartment smelled of yeast and coffee and old radiators.

"Sit," he said, and pointed the gun at a kitchen chair.

I sat.

A small figure in a quilted robe came out of the back room holding a wooden rolling pin.

Nonna Concetta was four foot eleven, with a white bun and arms that kneaded bread for a living.

She looked at my torn dress, my cut hair and my bleeding feet.

She put the rolling pin on the table.

"La piccola," she said, and went to put water on the stove.

Enrico sat across from me with the gun in his lap.

"Tell me something only you could know."

"You keep my baby tooth in a Sucrets tin under your mattress."

His mouth opened.

"You told me the tooth fairy was a Ferrara tradition and that the family took a cut."

"I was eleven," he said.

"I was seven."

Nonna laughed once, a sharp bark, and then turned and pretended to look for the tea.

My brother rubbed his face with both hands.

"All right. Say it all. Slow."

So I said it.

I told him about the wedding, and the house on Todt Hill that was supposed to be mine.

I told him about eight years, in four sentences, without looking at the table.

I left out the bathroom floor, because he was already holding the gun too tightly.

Nonna set a bowl of warm water on the floor and knelt in front of me with a cloth.

Her old hands were gentle on my feet.

She didn't say a word until I finished.

Then she said, "Your mother would have burned that house down with them inside it."

Nobody had spoken of my mother in front of me in six years.

I put my face in my hands for a moment.

Then I looked up.

"Papa will send people for me before the sun comes up."

"Not here," Enrico said. "Nobody knows I'm"

He stopped.

Everyone knew where Enrico was.

He lived over a bakery, with an old woman, in the neighborhood where he'd been put out.

At twenty to five the first oven in the bakery below clicked on by itself, like it did every morning.

Something heavy hit the back door.

Enrico was on his feet.

"Nonna, upstairs, behind the bed."

"I'll do no such thing," said Nonna, and picked up the rolling pin.

I took a heavy sheet pan off the rack and went down the iron stair behind him in my bare feet.

The back door flew in.

Two men came through it in dark coats, wearing gloves.

The first one had a pistol with a long barrel and he lifted it toward Enrico's chest.

I threw the sheet pan.

It cracked off his wrist and the gun went skittering under the bread rack.

Enrico hit him at the waist, and they went over the marble counter together.

The second man was bigger.

He caught my arm and shoved me hard into the flour bin, and the lid slammed and white powder filled the air.

I scooped a double handful and threw it into his eyes.

He swore and swung blindly.

Nonna came out of the dark with the long iron peel she used for the ovens.

She hit him behind the knee, and then across the back of the head, and he dropped.

I didn't hear the first man fall.

There was a crack from the counter, loud as a bone, and then a silence.

Enrico stepped back.

The man in the dark coat lay with his head against the marble corner.

His neck sat at the wrong angle, and his eyes were open.

"Rico," I said.

"I didn't," my brother said. "He went over. I only"

"I know."

Nonna was already pulling bakery twine off the shelf.

She tied the big man's wrists with a knot that I suspected she had used on a lot of things.

Enrico crouched over the dead man, breathing hard.

He turned the hand over.

On the middle finger was a heavy gold signet ring stamped with a small F and a crown.

I had seen that ring every Sunday of my childhood, on my father's driver.

My brother stared at it for a long time.

"That's Papa's," he said. "He gave one to every man he trusts."

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