The Mafia Lost His Queen novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Nine Years
On their anniversary Armando makes Gianna wait on his pregnant mistress in front of eighty guests, Serena shoves her down the cellar stairs, and in the hospital, with the baby gone, Gianna asks her bodyguard to help her die.
On our ninth anniversary, my husband handed me an apron and told me to wait on his pregnant mistress.
He did it in the ballroom, in front of eighty guests.
That morning I had left a small silver box on his desk.
Inside it was a pregnancy test with two pink lines, and a card in my handwriting.
"Nine years. Number ten comes in June."
All day I waited for him to say something.
He didn't.
At eight o'clock he tapped his glass with a knife, and the room went quiet.
"Thank you all for coming," he said. "Tonight I want to introduce someone."
A blonde girl in a white dress stepped up beside him.
She had one hand on her stomach. It was round and high under the silk. Five months, maybe.
"Serena Abate," Armando said. "The mother of my heir."
Her father raised his glass at the front table.
The Abate men raised theirs.
Then the whole room did, because the Don had.
I stood by the cake I had baked myself, four tiers of lemon and cream, and held my glass so hard the stem bent my fingers back.
Armando crossed the room to me.
He kissed my cheek for the guests.
Then he put his mouth to my ear.
"The Abates are watching how you take this. You'll wait on her all night."
"Armando."
"Or the bank calls your cousin's mortgage on Monday. Your choice, sweetheart."
He tied a white apron around my waist himself, right there, while people pretended not to look.
His hands were gentle.
That was the worst part.
Serena sat at the head table in my chair.
"I'll have the veal," she said. "No sauce. And bring my shawl, it's cold in here."
I brought her the veal.
I brought her the shawl.
I cut her meat when she told me her wrist was sore.
Someone at the Abate table laughed out loud.
Serena dropped her napkin on the floor and looked at me.
I picked it up.
Then she slid one foot out from under the table.
The strap of her sandal had come loose.
"Could you?" she said. "I can't bend. You understand."
The room got very quiet.
I looked at Armando.
He was talking to her father and didn't look back.
I knelt on the ballroom floor in my cream silk dress, in front of everyone who had come to my wedding, and buckled her shoe.
My hands were shaking so badly it took me three tries.
"Good girl," Serena said softly.
When I stood up, my knees were wet from spilled champagne.
At ten she wanted wine.
"Not this," she said, pushing the glass away. "Armando says there's an '82 Barolo in the cellar. Go get it."
"You're pregnant."
"One sip. Go."
The cellar door was at the end of the kitchen hall.
Twenty-two stone steps went down into the cold.
I was halfway down when I heard her heels behind me.
"I'll pick it," Serena said. "You'll grab the wrong one."
At the bottom she ran a nail along the racks and didn't look at a single label.
"He told me you'd be good at this," she said. "Serving."
I turned around and started back up the stairs.
"Get your own wine."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. I'm done."
I was near the bottom when her hand closed on my wrist.
She was stronger than she looked.
"You don't get to be done," she said. "You get to be gone."
She pulled, and then she shoved.
I remember the edge of a step against my hip.
I remember the stone floor coming up flat and hard.
Then a pain in my stomach so deep I couldn't breathe around it.
When I could see again, there was light at the top of the stairs.
Armando stood in the doorway in his black dinner jacket.
"What happened?"
"She tripped," Serena said. She was already crying. "She just fell, Armando. I tried to catch her."
I looked down.
There was blood on my cream dress.
A lot of it.
"Armando," I said. "Armando, the baby."
He didn't come down.
"Get up," he said. "You're embarrassing me."
Then he held out his hand, and Serena climbed the stairs and took it.
They went back to the party together.
I heard the band start up again.
I lay on the floor of the cellar with my hands pressed between my legs and the wine racks going dark around me.
Then there were heavy boots on the stone.
Rory.
He'd been my bodyguard for five years. He was English and enormous and almost never spoke.
He got down on his knees in my blood without a word.
"I've got you," he said. "Hold on to my neck."
He carried me up the back stairs, past the kitchen, past the housekeeper with both hands over her mouth.
Armando's voice came from the ballroom door behind us.
"Rory. The back way. Don't let the guests see."
Rory didn't answer him.
He put me in the car and ran two red lights on the way to the hospital.
At one in the morning a doctor sat down on the edge of my bed.
She took my hand before she said it.
"I'm so sorry, Mrs. Lucchese. You've lost the pregnancy."
I nodded.
I said thank you, because my mother raised me to.
When she left, Rory was standing by the window with his phone lit up in his hand.
"Is that him?"
He didn't want to show me.
I held out my hand until he did.
"Is she done making a scene? Bring the car back by midnight. The Abates need a ride home."
It was already one.
I gave the phone back to him.
Nine years.
I thought about the silver box, sitting unopened on his desk.
I thought about going home to that house, to her in my chair, to the cellar door at the end of the hall.
I couldn't.
Not one more night.
And Armando Lucchese did not let his wife leave him.
Nobody had ever left him alive.
"Rory," I said.
He turned from the window.
"Help me die."
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