Chapter 20: Ninety Days Is Up

By noon, Dario sat locked in his own cellar, and twelve captains stood guard over the door.

Nobody had fired a shot.

His soldiers had put down their rifles in the church vestibule, one after another, when the old Balestra captain told them to.

Lidia was in my father's guest room with two of the seven outside it and a doctor looking after her stomach.

She had asked me for nothing, and that was harder to bear than begging.

The table would sit at dawn to judge him.

Until then there was nothing left for me to do, so I went to the yard.

It was ninety days to the night since I had stood in my father's hall with a brass key in my hand.

I had not counted.

I knew it anyway.

Santino's office sat above the gatehouse, on the other side of the wall from his cot.

The cranes were dark against the sky, and a freight bell rang somewhere along the water.

He was at the desk with a bag of frozen peas against his eye, reading a shipping manifest.

He looked up when I closed the door behind me.

"Gem."

"What time is it?"

He glanced at the clock over the filing cabinet.

"Ten past nine."

"Then it's day ninety," I said.

He put down the peas.

His smile was slow, and it pulled at the stitched lip, and he winced and kept smiling anyway.

"Ninety days, Donna," he said.

My knees went weak.

"You've waited three months to say that again."

"Longer. Three years, if you count the wall."

He stood and came around the desk, and I put my hand flat on his chest and stopped him.

"No hands," I said.

"Your rule expired."

"My rule has a new term."

"Which is?"

"Mine."

I pushed him back until the edge of the desk caught him behind the thighs.

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