The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Rice in His Collar

At dawn Teo arrives in his tuxedo and Dalia hands back his ring in front of the nurses, then the man at the nursery glass says she has her mother's face.

For a long moment there was only the hiss of the machine.

Then the old voice came back, flat as a ruler.

"My granddaughter is downstairs at her own wedding," she said. "I watched her cut the cake."

"Then you watched her wear my mother's locket."

"Don't call this number again."

The line went dead.

I sat there with the phone against my ear until the nurse took it out of my hand.

"You need to sleep," she said.

I didn't sleep.

I watched my daughter watch the ceiling.

I watched my son scream at the indignity of a diaper.

At three I fed them both, one on each side, the way the nurse showed me.

I cried so quietly that neither of them noticed.

At five-forty the sky over the parking garage turned gray.

At six I heard him in the hall.

I knew his walk.

I'd known it for two years, since the first morning he came into my bakery at five a.m.

He'd bought six cannoli and eaten one standing at the counter.

The door opened.

Teo stood there in his tuxedo.

The bow tie was gone and the collar was open.

There was rice caught in the fold of it, white grains against the black.

His gray eyes went to the bassinets and stayed there.

"Dalia."

"Don't," I said.

"Benny got to me at four. They had her stuck at the back of the hall all night. I came the second she..."

"You swore on your father."

He stopped.

"I know what I swore," he said.

He took a step toward the boy.

"No," I said.

He stopped again.

Teo Valenti ran trucks and a produce terminal and eleven restaurants.

I was fairly sure by then that he ran a lot of other things he'd never told me about.

Grown men stepped off the sidewalk for him on Taylor Street.

He stood in a hospital doorway and didn't move because I told him not to.

"I want to hold my son," he said.

"I wanted you to hold my hand."

"Let me fix it."

"You can't fix it. It's done. They're born. You missed it."

My voice came out louder than I meant it to.

The boy woke and started yelling.

Teo moved before I could stop him, out of pure instinct, and I sat up so fast the stitches pulled.

"Out in the hall," I said. "Now."

I don't know how I got out of that bed.

The nurse tried to stop me and then gave up and got me a robe.

I shuffled into the corridor in hospital socks and a cream shawl.

My hair was falling out of its knot, and the plastic bracelet was still on my wrist.

Two nurses at the station stopped typing.

A man with a balloon froze by the elevator.

Teo followed me out and shut the door on our children's crying.

"Say what you came to say," I said.

"I'm going to end it. The church thing. Give me time to do it right with the Table and it's over."

"You told me eight months."

"I'll make it less."

"You told me she goes home."

"She will."

"You told me you'd be here."

He didn't have anything for that one.

I twisted the ring off my finger.

It was a plain gold band from a jeweler on Wabash.

He'd bought it the morning we married, nineteen minutes before the clerk called our number.

Benedetta had made us take a picture under the county seal.

"Take it," I said.

"Dalia, no."

"Take it, or I drop it on the floor, and you can pick it up in front of everybody."

The nurses weren't even pretending anymore.

Teo held out his hand.

The scar across his knuckles was white under the hall lights.

I put the ring in his palm.

"I'm done," I said. "Not angry. Done. The babies are mine. You'll see them when I say so, and today I don't say so."

His hand closed slowly around the ring.

"You don't mean that."

"Ask your bride what I mean. She can ask her grandmother."

His eyes narrowed. "What does Ludovica have to do with this?"

The words were right there, my mother's locket, my mother's name.

But he'd married the girl wearing it nine hours ago, under that old woman's roof, and I didn't know anymore whose side he'd stand on.

"Go home, Teo," I said. "Take the rice out of your collar."

Then he turned and walked to the elevator, and the man with the balloon stepped back to let him pass.

The nurse put a hand under my elbow.

"Let's get you back to bed, honey."

"In a minute. I want to see them through the glass."

The nursery window was at the end of the corridor.

They'd moved my two in there while we talked, side by side, BOY and GIRL on blue and pink cards, SAVINO underneath in marker.

Someone was already standing at the glass.

An older man in a gray cashmere coat, silver hair combed back, rimless glasses.

He had a bouquet of white roses in the crook of his arm, wrapped in tissue, the kind you bring to a funeral.

He was looking at my daughter.

I knew his face from the Valenti Christmas party Teo never took me to. Benedetta had shown me pictures.

Ruggero Cassio.

Donna Ludovica's consigliere.

The man who'd found her a granddaughter.

He turned his head when I came close, slow and polite.

He looked at my face for a long time.

Then he smiled.

"You have your mother's face, Dalia," he said.

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