Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Name Your Price
Roxie wakes a week before the surgery that killed her in her first life, names a two-million-dollar price her stepbrother pays on the spot, and hires the Ferryman to make her vanish, until Lucio is waiting at the curb outside the pawnshop.
"Name your price, Rox. Just get on that table and save her."
That was the last thing my stepbrother ever asked me for.
I didn't name a price.
I loved his sister too much to haggle over her.
Six days later I lay on a gurney in a clinic in Cranston with a paper cap over my hair.
The doctor's clipboard hung off the rail by my feet.
I read it upside down because there was nothing else to look at.
There were two names on it.
Mine, and under it, Lucio Ventresca.
Next to his, in blue ink, someone had written MATCH.
Then someone had scratched it out so hard the pen tore the paper.
I opened my mouth to ask.
The mask came down over it.
The last thing I remember is the cold.
It came up out of the table into my back.
A machine beeped faster and faster.
A man said, "She's bleeding," like I'd spilled something on his floor.
Then nothing.
Then a pen in my hand.
I was sitting in the leather chair in Lucio's study, on the Hill.
The fig tree scraped the window.
A consent form lay on the desk in front of me with my name typed at the top.
The date above the signature line said Sunday, May 3.
I dropped the pen.
Lucio sat behind his father's old desk with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
My mother perched on the arm of the sofa in cream silk with her legs crossed.
The clinic doctor stood by the bookshelf, turning his hat in his hands.
Lucio leaned forward on his elbows.
"Name your price, Rox. Just get on that table and save her."
Same words.
Same low voice.
Same gold signet ring tapping the blotter.
I looked down at my arms.
No tape, no tube.
Just the little burn scars from the shop, freckled up both wrists the way they'd always been.
I was twenty-six years old, and I was alive, and I was back on the day he asked.
"She'll do it," my mother said. "Roxie's always been the useful one."
She said it to Lucio, not to me.
My father's old wedding band glittered on her right hand.
She'd worn it there for ten years and called it her lucky ring.
Leni wasn't in the room.
Leni was across town with her arm hooked to a machine.
She was twenty-three and her kidneys were done.
The doctor cleared his throat.
"Saturday at eight. The crossmatch is excellent. Honestly, I couldn't ask for a better donor."
Excellent.
I thought of the clipboard, and the blue ink, and the tear in the paper.
Lucio was thirty-one.
He'd been Don for two years, since his father's heart stopped at this same desk.
When my mother married his father, I was sixteen and Lucio was twenty-one and away at college in Boston.
For ten years after that he sat across from me at Sunday dinner and passed me the bread.
He never once called me his sister.
He never called me anything but Rox.
He was watching me now.
"Well?"
I picked the pen back up.
Then I set it down on top of the form, very neatly.
"You said name my price."
"I did."
"Two million dollars. Wired to my account before I walk out of this room."
My mother's laugh came out sharp. "Roxie."
"The deed to 312 Atwells. My father's shop. In my name, not the family's."
"Lucio, she's being dramatic. She doesn't mean it."
"And seven days," I said. "Nobody touches me. Nobody tells me what to eat or where to sleep. Seven days that are mine."
The doctor stopped turning his hat.
Lucio looked at me for a long time.
Something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't read and didn't want to.
Then he picked up his phone.
"What's your account number?"
I told him.
He called his bank on a Sunday, and somebody at his bank answered on a Sunday.
He read my number twice.
Then he called the family lawyer at home and told him to have the Atwells deed drawn up in my name by tonight.
"That building is family property," my mother said. Her smile had gone tight at the corners.
Lucio didn't look at her.
"It's her price."
My phone buzzed against my hip.
I took it out.
The bank app showed a balance with more zeroes than I'd ever seen in one place.
Lucio turned the form around and slid the pen back across the desk.
"Your turn."
I signed my name the way I signed for glass deliveries at the shop.
Quick and flat.
I had no plan to be anywhere near Cranston on Saturday.
My mother caught my shoulder on my way out.
"My brave girl," she said, loud enough for the doctor.
Her nails went into my collarbone.
My father's ring pressed cold against the side of my neck.
I drove back to the shop and sat in the dark with every tube on the wall switched off.
When I was little, my father used to tell me a bedtime story about the Hill.
If you ever have to run, Roxie-girl, there's a man on Atwells who'll take you across the river.
You just have to ask the right way.
He'd painted the gold balls on the pawnshop sign three blocks down himself.
He always winked when we walked past it.
At a quarter to midnight I walked past it again.
The door was unlocked.
An old man sat behind the counter under a rack of guitars, reading the racing form.
He didn't look up.
"We're closed, sweetheart."
"I need a ride across the river."
He folded the paper.
He looked at me over his glasses for so long I thought I'd gotten the words wrong.
Then he got up, went into the back, and came out with a cheap black phone from inside a guitar case.
"Don't call. He texts. He doesn't like questions and he doesn't like liars."
There was one number saved in it.
I typed with my back against the cold glass of the door.
I need to disappear. I have seven days.
The answer came before I'd put the phone away.
From whom.
My thumbs hovered.
Then I typed his name.
My stepbrother. Lucio Ventresca.
Nothing for a long minute.
The old man had gone back to his racing form.
Then: Understood. Go home. Change nothing. I will tell you how.
I tucked the phone into my bra and pushed the door open.
A black car sat at the curb with its engine running.
The driver's window slid down.
Lucio's phone lay face down on his thigh, still glowing at the edges.
"Get in," he said. "What were you doing in a pawnshop at midnight, Rox?"
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