The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Four in the Morning

I held the two rings in my palm.

They were so warm.

Five months he'd walked around Chicago with my ring against his chest, and never said a word.

He hadn't said it at the Morra table, or in the hospice lot, or on my sidewalk with the divorce papers in his hand.

"You could have told me," I said.

"You'd have thought I was asking for something."

"You were."

"No." He looked down at the rings in my hand. "I was keeping them. That's different."

I closed his fingers over both of them.

"Keep them there," I said. "Someday you ask me for mine properly. Not tonight."

"Not tonight," he said.

"Tonight, come upstairs."

I unlocked my door.

The front room was dark.

The chairs were up on the tables, and the case was wiped down.

My father's gold letters threw their shapes across the floor from the streetlight.

We went through the kitchen, past the old baker's chair, past the oven.

At the bottom of the back stairs he stopped and looked at the chair lift.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to ride it."

"I installed it. I have rights."

I put my hand over his mouth and pulled him up the stairs by his tie.

The door to the yellow room was shut.

Behind it, very faintly, I heard my grandmother say, "That's not how you hold the cards."

And Benedetta, "It's how I cheat."

Teo started to laugh.

I pushed him into my room and closed the door on it.

The double crib he'd built stood empty against the wall.

The only light came from the streetlamp through the curtains.

I was still in the black wool dress I'd worn to the Table.

The emerald was on my hand, and my mother's locket on its chain.

He stood in the middle of my room in his dark suit, his tie half off, the rings hanging outside his shirt.

He didn't come any closer.

He was waiting for me.

He'd been waiting since October.

"My doctor cleared me in November," I said. "In case you were going to ask."

"I was going to ask."

"I know. That's why I said it."

I reached behind my neck and undid the top button of my dress.

The top button came loose.

Then the next.

I watched his hands flex at his sides.

"You're not helping," I said.

"You didn't ask me to."

"I'm asking now. The rest of them. Down the back."

He crossed the room.

Not fast.

Like he was afraid the floor would tip, or I would.

He stopped behind me and I felt the heat of him down my whole spine before he touched a single button.

He started at the nape.

One button.

Then the next, lower, his knuckles grazing my skin through the gap.

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