Chapter 9: Teo's POV

Teo's POV

I waited until her breathing went slow and heavy against my arm.

Then I slid out from under her hand, found my jeans in the dark, and left.

She was still asleep when I closed the door.

I told myself that was the only reason I could walk away.

The Rusconi Social Club had one camera, over the front door, and it had been broken for two years.

I knew because I had checked it every week since March.

I went in through the alley and the kitchen window, the one Gino used to complain about.

I landed on a stack of milk crates.

It smelled the same.

Old coffee and floor wax.

My brother used to bring me here on Sundays when I was home on leave.

He made me eat cannoli at the bar while he finished the club's books.

"Boring work," he'd say. "But it's honest."

He had been wrong about that.

The office was a narrow room at the end of the hall.

It held a desk and a gray safe bolted to the floor.

Corrado kept the club's real ledger in that safe.

Gino had told me once, laughing, that the combination was Ignazio's wedding anniversary, because Corrado couldn't remember any other number.

I knelt on the carpet and spun the dial.

Left, right, left.

The door swung open.

I took out a cash box, a deed folder, and a green cloth ledger with a cracked spine.

I opened it on the desk under a penlight.

Two years of my brother's neat handwriting ended in March.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Father's Test Turns Lovers Into Killers from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.