The Don Played Broke to Test Me, So I Left With His Baby novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Test
Joanna learns she is pregnant, flushes the pills Bruna hands her, and finds out her broke boyfriend is a Don who was testing her; she refuses him and collapses.
I fainted in the back room of the flower shop with a crate of lilies in my arms.
My boss drove me to the ER in the delivery van and ran every red light on the way.
The doctor read my chart and told me I was twelve weeks pregnant.
I had blamed the dizziness on working two jobs.
Cesare got there with dock grease still on his hands.
He had not slept in two days.
He sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the heartbeat on the monitor with his eyes shut.
"I want to keep it," I told him.
He nodded slowly and did not answer.
Months earlier his family had thrown him out, and the men he owed had come for everything else.
Since then he had hauled cargo at the docks all day and driven a rideshare until three in the morning.
I poured drinks at an underground bar until close and sold roses all day, and every dollar went to his debt.
The clinic wanted eighteen hundred dollars in cash.
Cesare spent that night counting every bill he owned.
He came up with nineteen hundred and fifty.
"It's enough, Jo," he said, and could not look at me.
His older sister Bruna came to our apartment at dusk with a pot of soup.
Bruna was the only Lombardi who still answered his calls.
She had paid our gas bill twice and never mentioned it.
She set the soup on the stove, then took a pill bottle out of her purse and put it in my hand.
A strip of masking tape covered the label.
"Laxatives," she said. "The strong kind. Take a few extra and it passes by morning, no clinic and no bill."
She squeezed my fingers around the bottle.
"You two have bled enough already, Joanna. Let this one go."
I looked at Cesare.
He looked at the floor for a long time.
Then he nodded.
"Do this one thing for me, Jo," he said. "When I'm back on top, I'll spend my whole life making it up to you."
Bruna did not leave until she had watched him nod.
She kissed my cheek at the door and said she would check on me tomorrow.
Cesare did not ask to see the bottle.
I noticed that, and I did not say it.
My boss Tillie called twice to tell me the shop would hold my job for as long as I needed.
I told her I'd be fine.
Cesare left for the docks at six.
I stood in our kitchen and listened to his truck pull away.
Then I opened the bottle and poured every tablet into the toilet.
I flushed twice.
One tablet had stuck to the inside of the cap.
I dropped it into my coat pocket without thinking and put the empty bottle in a drawer.
I had not slept in two days, and I could not lie awake with it any longer.
So I took two of my own sleeping pills, the ones I used after bar shifts, and sat down on the bed.
I decided right then that I was keeping my baby, with him or without him.
I did not get to finish deciding anything else.
Engines roared in the street below.
I went to the window and saw six black cars at the curb in front of our crooked building.
Men in dark suits stepped out and held the doors.
From the last car came Cesare, in a camel coat that had to cost more than our rent for a year.
He came up the stairs two at a time and took me in his arms before I could speak.
"Congratulations, Jo," he said against my hair. "You passed."
I stood very still.
"I'm the Don of the Lombardi family," he said. "There was no debt. My family never threw me out."
"The docks, the apartment, the men who came for us were all mine."
"I had to know you'd stay when I had nothing. Nobody has ever loved me without wanting what I own."
His men stood in the hallway and looked at the wall.
Bruna stood behind them with her purse held against her chest.
She did not look at me.
"You stayed," he said. "Marry me, and let's raise our child the right way."
Eight months of double shifts passed through my head.
The blisters on my hands.
The meals I had skipped so his payments would not be late.
The tablets in the bottle, and the tape across the label, and the way he had nodded.
All of it had been a prop in his test.
My ears began to ring, and the sleeping pills pulled at my knees.
I smiled at him, and I shook my head.
"No," I said. "This baby and I are done being your proof."
The room tilted, and the floor came up.
Cesare caught me before I hit it.
The last thing I heard was Bruna's voice in the doorway, sharp and fast.
"Which pills did she take? Ask her which pills!"
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