The Mafia Wife's Revenge novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Same Chair

The photo reached my phone at nine that night.

It showed my mother's headstone in the dark, with a yellow backhoe parked beside the grave.

Under it was one line from a number I did not know.

"The garage under the brownstone. Alone. Ten o'clock. Bring a pen."

Maeve read it over my shoulder and said a word I will not repeat.

"You are not going," Cillian said.

"I'm going."

"Helena, that is the place..."

"I know what it is."

I looked at him straight, and he stopped.

"He wants me alone, and he'll get me alone. You'll be at the corner of the street with Maeve's phone on an open line."

"When I say 'blue stitch,' you come through the door."

He looked at my face for a long time.

"You've decided this," he said.

"I decided it in the car on the bridge."

He nodded once, and that was the first thing he ever gave me without asking for anything back.

The garage door was already up.

A single bulb hung over the concrete, and under it, in the exact middle of the floor, stood a wooden chair.

I knew the chair.

Damian stood beside it in his shirtsleeves with a pistol in his hand, and Camilla sat on an overturned crate with her phone held up, filming.

"Sit, darling," Damian said.

I sat.

I wanted my hands free, and the rope on the chair arm was for show.

He tied my right wrist anyway, not tight, almost gently, the way he had once tucked a blanket round my knees.

"Say it," he said, to Camilla's camera. "Say your name."

"I'm Helena Ashworth."

"And you made a mistake in front of the Table. Cillian Dunne and Camilla's brother lied to you, because Cillian wants Keane's money."

"Say it."

"Why would I?"

He crouched in front of me.

He was close enough that I could count his eyelashes, and he looked tired and furious and still so perfectly polite.

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