The Don's Deadliest Obsession novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Between the Guns

My father parked his black car in the middle of the Quintero drive.

Forty men stood behind him in two rows, and every one of them had a coat open over a gun.

The Quintero captains came down the steps and spread out on the other side.

Nobody drew.

The gravel was so quiet I could hear the Hudson.

Tadeo walked to the gate and stopped ten feet from my father, with his hands loose at his sides.

I walked after him.

"Don Brancato," he said. "You're at my door uninvited."

"I've come for my daughter." My father looked past him, found me, and smiled. "Not that one. She's yours, and I wish you joy of her. The other one. Giulia."

"She came to my house on her own feet."

"She's sick and confused. She'll come home and be looked after."

"Looked after." I heard myself say it.

I stepped out in front of Tadeo.

He said my name once, quietly, and didn't try to stop me.

"Serafina," my father said, soft as a priest. "Go inside."

"No."

His smile held.

"You hit a pregnant woman in front of two hundred people, Papa," I said, loud enough for the second row to hear. "Three of them are standing behind you. Ask them what they saw."

A Brancato man near the back looked at his shoes.

Another one did the same.

"You want her home so she can lose it quietly," I said. "Where nobody can see. Everyone here knows what you do in that house."

My father's face did not change at all.

It was the stillness I had learned as a child to be afraid of.

"You would shame me in front of my men," he said.

"You did that yourself."

For a long moment he looked at me, and I knew I had made an enemy of the man who raised me.

Then he turned to the car.

"Come home when you're done playing, Serafina," he said over his shoulder. "You'll find the door open. Or you'll find nothing at all."

The forty men followed him out of the gate, and nobody breathed until the last engine faded.

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