My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Seat

I looked at the twelve hands, and I looked at the pistol in the grass, and I did not say the word.

"Gemma," the gray captain said. "It's the law."

"It's my father's grave."

"Which is why it's yours to decide."

Dario was smiling at me.

He wanted the bullet.

A bullet in a cemetery would make him a Don who died on his feet, and a Don who died on his feet gets a funeral, and a funeral gets a legend.

"No," I said.

The hands wavered.

"No, he lives. He walks out of here with every word he said tonight on a recording, and my godfather will sit in a courtroom and say what he saw."

The old Balestra captain spoke into the silence.

"We don't talk to the law."

"We don't," I said. "He does. He's the one who broke the oldest rule we have, so he can face the one we don't."

Dario's smile began to slide.

"You'd put a Don in front of a judge?"

"You're not a Don," I said. "You're a husband who killed his father-in-law for the chair. Let the judge call you that."

For the first time that night, he looked afraid.

Santino stood beside me and said nothing, and his hand was near mine, and he did not touch it.

The gray captain looked at the others and lowered his arm.

"Alberto's daughter," he said, and the rest followed.

Nino made one call from his hospital bed, with his cast propped on two pillows, and he told me afterward he had waited three years to dial that number.

By sunrise, Dario sat in the back of a car with a federal agent on each side.

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