The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Through the Door

The old bodyguard stood on the step beside me and buttoned his coat.

"Forty years," I said.

"Forty-one in March."

Teo was already out of the car and halfway up the steps.

"What happened? I heard a machine."

"Her heart," I said. "They threw me out. They threw him out."

The ambulance came eight minutes later, lights and no siren.

We stood on the gravel and watched them carry her out on a stretcher, so small under the blanket it looked empty.

Carlotta rode with her.

Ruggero followed in his own car and didn't look at us.

The old man watched the taillights all the way down the drive.

"Loyola," he said. "In Maywood. She'll go to the cardiac ICU. She always does."

"Always?"

"Third time this year." He looked at me. "The first two times, she asked for the same thing when she woke up. A girl's name. He made sure nobody heard it but me."

I didn't sleep that night.

I sat up in the old baker's chair in my smoky kitchen, with the tin on the steel table.

Teo sat on the flour bin across from me.

Neither of us said much.

At four I said, "I'm going to see her."

"He'll have men on the door."

"I know."

"Then I'm coming."

"Not the way you mean," I said. "If you come in there with a gun, it's a war, and she's in the middle of it, with a heart that stops."

He took a long breath.

Then he took a gun out from under his jacket and set it on my steel table beside the tin.

I'd never once seen him carry one.

"Like this?" he said.

"Like that."

At eleven in the morning we walked out of the elevator onto the fourth floor at Loyola.

My son was strapped to my chest.

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