The Don Shielded Her. So I Became Bratva Queen. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Not for Me
At 9:14 PM a bullet shatters the window at Simona's anniversary dinner and her husband dives across the table for his brother's widow; Simona puts her ring down in front of his captains and walks into the Bratva bathhouse, where Kirill Antonov tells her the gunmen's car had her photo on the dash.
The first bullet shattered the restaurant window at 9:14 PM.
I know the time because I was looking at my watch, wondering when Vin would stop talking to her.
My husband dove across the table.
Not for me.
For her.
He went over the bread basket and the candle and took Romina to the floor in one move, his whole body over hers.
The second bullet hit the wall above my head.
Glass came down on me.
Something hot cut across my left arm, and I was on the tiles before I knew I'd fallen.
Then it was quiet, except for a car screaming away down Passyunk.
And Romina, crying.
"Vin. Vin, I'm hurt. My wrist."
"I've got you. I've got you, baby. Don't look."
Baby.
I lay in the glass and watched my husband of four years lift his brother's widow off the floor.
Her white dress didn't have a spot on it.
My sleeve was soaked dark.
"Vin," I said.
He looked down at me.
For one second, I thought he saw the blood.
"You're okay," he said. "You're tough, Simona. Stay here, my guys are coming."
Then he carried her out the door to his car.
I heard it pull away.
It was our fourth anniversary.
He'd invited her because she "shouldn't be alone on a Friday."
She had asked me to swap seats before the antipasto.
"Do you mind? I always get cold by the door."
So I'd sat in the window.
A waiter crawled over to me with a tablecloth and pressed it on my arm.
He was shaking worse than I was.
"Ma'am, the ambulance..."
"No ambulance."
I got up.
I found my purse under the table and my keys in my purse.
I drove myself to Jefferson with the tablecloth tied around my arm with my teeth.
The doctor put eight stitches in a graze that ran across the outside of my arm.
He picked glass out of my cheek with tweezers and told me I was very lucky.
Through the curtain I could hear Vin's voice.
He was in the next bay.
With her.
"It's a scratch, sweetheart. They're going to clean it, that's all."
"Don't leave me."
"I'm not going anywhere."
I pulled the curtain back.
Romina was sitting on the bed with a tiny bandage on her wrist, and my husband was holding her hand with both of his.
He stood up fast.
"Simona. Jesus. Are you okay?"
"I was shot."
"Grazed," he said, looking at my arm. "They told me. You're fine."
"You left me on the floor."
He glanced at Romina, then back at me, and lowered his voice.
"She has nobody. She's fragile. You're strong."
"I'm bleeding, Vin."
"And you're standing up," he said. "She can't. You know what she's been through."
Romina pressed her face into his sleeve.
Over his arm, her eyes met mine.
They were completely dry.
I went home alone.
At two in the morning the kitchen was full of men.
Vin's captains stood around the island with their coats still on.
Vin was at the head of the table with a glass of whiskey and his tie off.
He didn't look up when I came in.
"It was the Russians," he said. "Antonov's people. They want the piers, they want this city, and tonight they came for my family."
The captains nodded.
"Tomorrow we answer," he said. "Nobody sleeps."
Then he looked at me.
"Romina stays here from now on. She'll take the master bedroom tonight, it's the safest room in the house. You can use the guest room."
One of the captains looked at the floor.
Nobody else did anything.
My arm throbbed under the bandage.
I walked to the table.
I took my wedding ring off, the diamond his mother picked, and set it down beside his glass.
The click was very loud.
"What's this?" Vin said.
"I'm leaving."
He laughed.
A couple of the captains laughed with him.
"Where are you going to go, Simona? Your father's dead. Every door in Philadelphia is mine."
"Not every door."
I went to the hall closet.
My father's pistol was where I'd kept it since the funeral, in a shoebox on the top shelf.
I put it in my coat pocket in front of all of them.
"Simona," Vin said. "Sit down."
I walked out the front door.
Nobody stopped me.
I think they were sure I'd be back by breakfast.
I drove north for forty minutes with one hand on the wheel.
The Antonov banya sits on Bustleton Avenue behind a black iron gate.
The bathhouse was closed.
The bar on the ground floor wasn't.
Two men in leather jackets stepped in front of the door when I got out of the car.
"I'm Simona Cammarata," I said. "Tell Kirill Antonov my husband just declared war on him."
One of them spoke Russian into his phone.
The door opened.
Inside it was warm and smelled like cedar and smoke.
A long bar, a long table, and a dozen men who all stopped talking.
At the end of the table, a big man with pale grey eyes and a scar through one eyebrow set down his glass.
I'd seen him once before, at my father's funeral.
He was the only man at that grave I'd shaken hands with who hadn't wanted something.
He took in the bandage, the glass cuts, the blood on my sleeve.
His face went very still and very cold.
"Mrs. Cammarata," Kirill said. "You're bleeding on my floor."
"My husband says you tried to kill his sister-in-law tonight."
"I didn't."
"I know," I said. "You'd have hit her."
The corner of his mouth moved.
Then he stood up.
"My men pulled the shooters' car out of the Delaware an hour ago," he said. "One of them was still in it."
He walked down the length of the table until he was close enough that I had to look up.
"There was a photo taped to the dashboard."
He took it out of his pocket and held it up.
"It was you."
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