After My Four Childhood Friends Abandoned Me, I Inherited a Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Men at the Door

Two men break in; Ilario kills one on her porch. Marta orders him out. A text on the survivor's phone says a second crew goes in at dawn.

I didn't run.

I pulled Nunzio inside by his wet sleeve and shut the door.

"How many?" I asked.

"Two. They're parked at the corner, I saw them. They're coming through the back."

"How do you know?"

"Because Ettore told me to leave the back gate unlatched this afternoon," Nunzio said, and his face fell apart. "I did it, Marta. I did what he said."

I looked at him for a moment.

I could have shouted.

Shouting would have taken the time I needed to think, and I had perhaps a minute.

"The pantry," I said. "Get in and don't come out."

He went.

I turned off the hall light and the lamp in the window.

My grandfather kept a shotgun in the umbrella stand by the cellar door.

I took it out and held it the way he had shown me when I was fourteen, with my elbow tucked in.

I had never shot at a person.

The kitchen window at the back of the house cracked once, softly, as someone pressed on it.

I stood in the dark hall with the barrel pointed at the kitchen door and counted.

The door opened, and a man in a black jacket stepped over the sill with a gun in his hand.

He saw the shotgun and stopped.

I didn't speak.

I wanted to, and the words came slow, as they always did.

He lifted his gun first.

Glass exploded from the front window behind me, and something tore across my left forearm.

I fired the shotgun into the ceiling because I had flinched.

Plaster rained down on my shoulders.

Then two shots came from the porch, so fast they ran together.

The man in the kitchen doorway dropped his gun and fell across the sill.

The front door slammed open.

Ilario came in with a pistol in his right hand, breathing hard, and he stepped over the first man.

A second man was crawling off the porch with one leg dragging behind him.

Ilario went back outside and put his boot on the man's wrist.

"Don't," he said, in a very low voice.

The man stopped moving.

I stood in the hall with the shotgun still raised, and blood ran off my fingertips onto my grandfather's good carpet.

"Marta."

Ilario came back in and took the shotgun out of my hands.

His voice had gone soft.

"Look at me. Sit down."

"Get out of my house."

He didn't move.

"You can't come into this house," I said. "You walked out of that cemetery with Ettore. You put your pin in my hand and you couldn't say my name."

"Sit down."

"I'm giving you an order."

I had never given anyone an order in my life.

My voice came out low and flat.

Ilario's jaw moved.

He put the shotgun against the wall and stepped back, and I thought he would go.

Instead he pulled a clean handkerchief out of his coat, took hold of my wrist, and wrapped my arm.

His hands were warm and fast and his bandaged palm pressed hard against my skin through the cloth.

"The glass cut you," he said. "It isn't deep."

"I said get out."

"Hold this."

He folded my other hand over the knot and held it there for a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he let go.

"I'll be on the porch," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Why?"

"Because it's where I'm supposed to be."

I opened my mouth to ask him what that meant.

He had already turned and gone out the front door, stepping over the man on the floor.

I heard him sit down on the top step.

I went to the kitchen and opened the pantry door.

Nunzio was curled against the flour bin with both hands over his ears.

"It's over," I said. "Come out."

"Is he dead?"

"One of them is."

He cried quietly for a while, and I didn't touch him.

When I came back to the porch, the wounded man was sitting against the rail with his hands tied behind him using Ilario's belt.

Ilario stood over him, looking at the street.

"He'll talk when he's asked," he said.

"Who sent you?" I said to the man.

He spat on the boards.

Ilario took a phone out of the man's jacket and held it up so the screen lit my face.

There was one message on it, from a number saved as "E."

It had come in ten minutes ago.

It read: Second crew goes in at dawn. Not the house. The club.

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