Tempting the Mafia Twins novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Duluth

Five years later Carmine walks into her bakery and swears it was a misunderstanding, and says their daughter's grave has no name.

Five years is long enough to learn how to make rye bread in the dark.

I was shaping loaves at five that Friday morning in Duluth, with the oven roaring and snow starting against the back window.

Halvorsen's Bakery opened at six.

By six forty the line ran out the door, because the first cold week of October always sends people looking for something warm.

I was twenty-six years old.

I used my mother's maiden name, and I didn't have a single photograph on my wall.

"Cassie," Inga called through the pass. "Cinnamon rolls are low."

"Coming."

I carried the tray out front, with flour to my elbows and my hair in a knot.

Then the bell over the door rang, and the whole line parted for a man in a black coat.

I knew the shoulders before I knew the face.

I put the tray down on the counter very carefully, because my hands had stopped being mine.

Carmine Valenti stood in the middle of a Minnesota bakery.

He was thinner.

The scar through his left eyebrow had gone white.

He wore his watch on his left wrist, the way he always had, and a plain gold band on his left hand, the one I had pushed onto his finger at the church.

Five years, and he had never taken it off.

"Cassie," he said.

Nobody had said it to me in five years.

The woman at the front of the line looked at him, then at me, and set down her coffee.

"We're closed to you," I said.

"I'll pay for the whole shop. I'll buy every loaf."

"We're closed."

"I need ten minutes."

"You had two years of them," I said. "You had one night in a hotel suite. Walk out of my bakery."

A man behind him cleared his throat and shifted his weight.

He was a driver with a flat gray face, come in out of the snow.

Carmine lifted a hand without turning.

The driver went still.

"I'm not here to take you anywhere," Carmine said. "I'm here to tell you what I should have told you five years ago."

Inga came through the swinging door with a rolling pin in her fist and her gray braid over one shoulder.

She was sixty-one and built like a dockhand.

"Who is this?" she asked me.

"My husband."

The line made a sound.

Inga didn't lower the rolling pin.

"The husband who put you in a hospital?"

"I never touched her," Carmine said.

He said it to me, not to Inga, with his eyes on my face.

"The woman in that room. I never touched her. I never slept with anyone but you, then or now."

I laughed, and the same awful sound came out of me that had come out in 1412.

"It's not what it looks like," I said. "You really are going to say it again."

"It was a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding."

"Yes."

"I stood in a doorway and watched you, Carmine. I watched you."

"You saw what you were meant to see."

"By who?"

His jaw worked.

A line of ten strangers waited with their coffee going cold.

"I can't tell you the rest," he said.

I stepped around the counter.

I had promised myself for years that I'd be cold if I ever saw him again, and I wasn't cold.

My face was wet.

"You can't tell me," I said.

"Not yet."

"You come here, in front of my customers, after five years of nothing."

"You say I was wrong about the worst night of my life."

"Then you say you can't tell me why?"

"Yes."

"Get out."

"Cassie."

"Get out of my bakery."

He didn't move.

Inga lifted the rolling pin to shoulder height.

"I'm counting," she said. "I'm up to one."

Carmine looked at me for a long moment.

Then he reached into his coat, slowly, and set something on the counter beside the cinnamon rolls.

It was a small gray card from a stonecutter's shop in Chicago, with a blank line where a name should be.

"It's been blank for five years," he said. "I couldn't put anything on it without you."

I didn't pick it up.

"Whose stone?" I asked, though I knew.

His voice cracked on the first word.

"Our daughter's. She has no name on her grave, Cassie. I wouldn't carve it without you."

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